Sanctifying Art. Deborah Sokolove

While both the poetic quality and the musical settings of such metrical psalms could be of high artistic quality, this was not always the case, and even when it was, such excellence was not always appreciated. Indeed, the primary value for the Reformers was that such songs allowed congregations to more easily memorize and internalize the psalms. This insistence on simplicity and accessibility continues to be an important criterion by which all the arts are evaluated in the church, often to the exclusion of any other value. Too often, the sensory elements through which meaning is also conveyed are completely ignored, as when exultant words are set to somber melodies.

A strict adherence to the psalms, however, was not the only didactic use of hymnody. Luther, in “Ein feste Burg,” and later Isaac Watts, in his volume The Psalms of David Imitated, interpreted the psalms through a New Testament lens. As Leaver points out, “The revolution that Watts brought about was his insistence that Christian congregational song cannot be confined to the Old Testament psalms, but must embrace the totality of Scripture.”8

Beyond Scripture, hymn texts were used to teach both doctrine and history. The martyr hymns of the various Anabaptist groups, such as the Mennonites, Hutterites, and Swiss Brethren, exemplify another didactic use of music. Persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants, the sufferings and faith of many executed Anabaptists were recounted in narrative songs intended to inspire their co-religionists to similar levels of commitment.9

      This emphasis on using art to instruct does not mean that all Reformation hymns and images were artistically worthless. Indeed, many hymn texts from the Reformation onward were poetically well-crafted and much of the music similarly excellent. When Martin Luther published his German translation of Scripture, he enlisted the eminent artist Lucas Cranach the Elder—best known for his Isenheim altarpiece—to provide the illustrations. However, this tendency to instrumentalize art, to see it as simply illustrative or a way to make a didactic point rather than to lead to new understandings through metaphoric and sensory qualities, has permeated the Protestant churches.

      By the late nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church had fallen into similar habits. As Colleen McDannel has shown, both Protestant and Catholic visual materials became increasingly bland and instructional in this period. As may be seen throughout McDannel’s lavishly illustrated volume, Material Christianity, the visual materials used by American Protestants and Catholics were virtually indistinguishable, and, indeed, often shared. In her discussion of the institutional and cultural structures surrounding the distribution of water from Lourdes following the miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary to the young peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, McDannel notes

Marian piety with the Lourdes water and replica grottoes flourished in the United States because its themes resonated not only with Catholic traditions but also with Victorian culture. Protestants and Catholics both acknowledged the healing capacities of water and sought to articulate religious and aesthetic values by creating Christian landscapes . . . . Although Catholics understood their Marian piety to be truly “Catholic,” the expressions of that piety drew from the culture of the time.10

      An examination of some visual materials from the late nineteenth century that McDannel shows will demonstrate the point. For example, an illustration of the church and shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes from the Catholic Herald, April 24, 1880, which McDannel reproduces as illustration 88 on page 134, and the print of visitors at the grave of David W. Gihon at the Laurel Hill Cemetery, printed in 1852 and reproduced as illustration 70 on page 112 in the same volume, exhibit similar visual devices, such as exaggerated poses, unequivocal directional cues, and sentimental references.

Prayer cards and other devotional materials featured rotogravure prints of images inspired by late Renaissance and Baroque prototypes. Such derivative images continually recycled visual ideas from the past rather than risking new interpretations that took into account current realities. When contemporary situations were included, they were usually sentimentalized or sensationalized, depending, again, on the didactic point that was intended. By the 1950s, this often took the form of clean-cut young people dressed in contemporary clothing in the presence of rather innocuous Jesus. Although Jesus was depicted dressed in robes, rather than the T-shirts and jeans of the young people, he somehow managed to look like a modern white American.11

Such images often moved easily and without comment between Protestants and Catholics. As just one example, a 1946 advertisement for a children’s coloring book from a Catholic goods house, reproduced by McDannel,12 juxtaposes simplified outlines of the popular Roman Catholic devotional figures, the Infant of Prague and Saint Anthony, with nineteenth-century Protestant artworks such as Holman Hunt’s Christ Knocking at Heart’s Door and Heinrich Hoffmann’s Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Similarly, images of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus often found their way into Protestant households.13 In an article about domestic shrines maintained by Protestant women in Pennsylvania, folklorist Yvonne Milspaw describes her Methodist grandmother’s shrine, which

held a variety of religious objects . . . [including] a glossy framed print of Christ crowned with thorns. Next to that were a votive candle in a broad green glass container, a small, golden glass brick with an intaglio of the crucifixion, and a small aluminum bottle (which had once contained Holy Water) decorated with a lithograph of Our Lady of Lourdes.14

      This denominational eclecticism continues into the present day. Having spoken about art in a wide variety of church-related venues and conversed with priests and pastors from all over the country, I have observed that today there is an even greater openness to a wider selection of visual materials in many Christian churches, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. However, all too often even excellent, evocative, multivalent artistic materials are subverted into didactic readings as congregations are encouraged to look for the one, true meaning of an artwork. This is parallel to a method of biblical interpretation that insists on a single, correct meaning for each chapter and verse, rather than a hermeneutic of questioning the text. Rather than allowing the arts to open conversations that lead to exploration of multiple ideas, artworks are overexplained, reduced to sermon illustrations rather than allowed to stand on their own as biblical interpretations or analogues of spiritual experience.

      Such single-message interpretations lead, too often, to a preacher or Sunday School teacher showing a Renaissance painting that depicts some scriptural narrative with no regard to the intrinsic meanings of the painting itself. Instead of attending to the specific ways that this painting tells the story in color, spatial emphasis, the visual relationships among the various characters, and any other telling details, the preacher will simply say, in effect, “I’m preaching on the Prodigal, so here’s a picture of that story,” while completely disregarding any potential conflict between the preacher’s interpretation and that of the artist. Equally disregarded is the potential for the image to illuminate the understanding of the text by either the preacher or the congregation through attention to the exegesis offered by the artist.

      This attitude devalues good art by refusing to recognize that anything other than its subject matter might contribute to its meaning. It also leads to joyless felt banners with the word “Joy” stitched across them; moralistic children’s stories that are so predictable that even the children are bored by them; and hymns of praise that are sung like dirges, more out of duty than any sense of delight in the presence of the living God.

      Commercializing Art: Making Art a Commodity

      There is a certain kind of art that is created solely for the purpose of aesthetic contemplation. Such works have no other purpose than to delight, to elicit the particular thrill that is felt by many in their presence. This is often termed high art, and is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the artistic enterprise.