Timothy Stoner

An Awful Beauty

Posted on 02. Jul, 2009 by Tim Stoner in Blog, art

I’m reading The Beauty of God, a collection of essays on Theology and the Arts. And, again, it has made me think of the function of art, and the calling of the artist, Christian or not. It seems to me that when authentic art is being “created”, or as one of the essayists has it–”improvised” one’s theistic commitment is not necessarily controlling. The history of art is replete with examples of magnificient works produced by the utterly non-magnificent, the profligate, the perverse, the God-hater, even.

The classical position, which I am learning flies under the philosophical banner of neo-Platonism views art as a window into the ideal world of the good, the true and the beautiful. Christian thought has chosen to step into those Greek cover-alls and require that the artist focus our attention on what is pretty, nice, sweet and hopeful (borrowing Paul’s words: “whatever is lovely, true, noble, and of good report”). But some of the stories in the Old Testament are about some pretty abysmal people doing some really dreadful things. The one that springs to mind immediately is that of the concubine cut up into twelve pieces and sent to the leaders of each of the tribes of Israel (Judges 20). Then there is this really shattering depiction of a perfectly righteous man being beaten, flayed and then hammered onto a cross to bleed out slowly.  

Are we to pretend the bad and the gruesome and the ugly don’t exist? Or is it the conscious task of the Christian artist (unconscious to the non-Christian) to show how God is present and or shows up in the middle of the awful? That He is there in the bloody awful terror and loss of war? Is an aspect of our calling to look fiercely and unflinchingly into and through the unbeautiful to expose the mystery of God hidden in the darkness; grace breaking out like a song on the bruised lips of a battered child.  

Robert Capa’s photograph of the death of Federico Borrell García, a Loyalist Militiaman during the Spanish Civil War, since I first saw it has seemed to be a model of this artistic paradox. There is an arresting, poetic, heroic drama in the instant of this pointless death–the loyalists lost the war.  The body as it is flung backwards has the graceful quality you expect to see in a ballet. It is a dreadful and a terrible beauty, it is an undignified robbery of life, but there is also this compelling dignity that the unseen and pitiless bullet cannot erase.

It makes me wonder whether the Catholic artist has an advantage over the Protestant artist in this regard. The Catholic has the benefit of  constantly being faced with a writhing, gory Christ on a cruel cross, the Protestant only looks at bare, laquered wood a symbol of shiny victory not an awful beauty. And again it makes me wonder whether the Cross is not, after all, the answer to all the biggest riddles of life, for through it God brought life out of death, grace and forgiveness out of condemnation, cleansing out of the most profound perversity, victory out of abject defeat, and forgiveness from the bitter cup of implacable judgment.

Tags: art, beauty, death, spanish civil war, ugly