Recently returned from Chapel Hill with
Cathy Gibbons, preparing for the upcoming T&P conference. While
we were there, for a little down-time, we paid a visit to the North
Carolina Museum of Art. Not looking for anything in particular, but
somehow a couple of the current exhibitions proved a revelation.
The first was "Object of
Devotion," a collection of alabaster carvings from medieval
England used as altar pieces in churches and private homes. The
second was a very contemporary display, "0 to 60 Seconds, The
Experience of Time...," a set of pieces which reflected the
feeling of time in our modern world. From stop-motion cameras
catching random images of you on a live screen as you walk by, to a
panoramic photo of a Brooklyn cityscape made of superimposed shots
over several days, the effect was always to empty out the thickness of the present moment. In its place was a fragmented
emptiness in which the the flick of a digital counter seemed the only
real information on offer.
In contrast the alabaster images were
heavy with presence. The figure of the Crucified was the most often
represented, flecked by blood and surrounded by various saints and
ecclesiastics. Sometimes there was also God the Father, figured as an
old man, almost cradling the tortured figure on his lap as he
received the sacrifice of the victim and gestured a satisfied
blessing. What made the carvings doubly interesting was the work of
Protestant iconoclasts who in several places had chopped away faces
and hands. The reformers saw the concrete representations as
idolatrous and the heavy sense of presence a human corruption of biblical belief. The only true communication with Christ's
atoning blood was via the semiotics of the word.
You could see immediately how the
Reformation amounted to a first deconstruction of sacred presence,
emptying out the world of the dense material of blood and sacrifice.
In its place it put a much freer word-based presence, finding in the
text of the New Testament the personal assurance of Christ's blood
shed to make us righteous. This other, written presence also had its
cultural day, filling millions and millions with a sacred glow. In
the Protestant nations that meaning also stood firmly behind the
whole of society giving it metaphysical weight and energy. But now for the
artists and poets, the women and men who are sensitive to the quality
of the times, all that has almost completely gone, crumbling
into digital fracture and fragility. A world without the sacred. Why?
.
It is the deconstructive quality of the
Passion itself which brought about the Protestant revolt. The
iconoclasm would not have happened had not those images of bloodshed
and torture already come into crisis for a significant group of
Christians. There was an in-built dynamic in the gospel account which
made the violence of the passion more and more an event of actual
human violence, making the feeling of human guilt ever greater and
more conflicted. So it was, within the framework of legal atonement which
dominated the Middle Ages, the disclosure of violence simply demanded
a more absolute or transcendent sacrifice. Thus, even as Luther and
his successors transferred atonement to an inner written contract
with God, they raised the sacrificial meaning of the passion to an
ever-greater power, an unyielding penal substitution performed before a
God of wrath.
And yet, and yet. That could and would never stop the slow,
steady erosion of sacrificial meaning brought about from within the
gospels themselves, the collapse of sacrificial order which Rene' Girard has so
convincingly demonstrated. And so, in turn, we get to the present moment,
when the Protestant sacrificial scheme no longer stands behind
culture, just as the Catholic scheme was lost for many societies back
in the 16th century.
Of course both Catholic and Protestant
cultures can double down on the past and its sacred presence.
The fact that institutional Christianity seems always to reinvent
that old presence, even as the world has lost it, is surely one of
the reasons for overall declining churches, along with the declining
formal language of Christianity. You can only repeat the old formula
for so long, before the incongruity makes Christianity simply a
museum entertainment.
Where, then, is the new sacred for our
age, one that might fill those empty digital spaces with meaning? Is
there anything that can speak at the heart of contemporary time,
which might even produce a new type of art?
The answer must surely be yes! If we
agree that the loss of sacred presence is an effect of the gospel
itself then the transformation of time must be part of that loss: only that secular inspiration can only see as far as the emptying
out. It does not see the deep nonviolence and compassion which is
driving the process. Perhaps that is because most Christians
themselves don't see it. They don't see or feel future Christ-time leaning
deep into present time, a gentle, forgiving future which, in a
nutshell, is the new sacred. So they are lost betwixt and between,
between a disappearing archaic sacred and a heavenly world where
transformation is supposed to happen, but does so with less and less
conviction in a modern world.
Time is relationship. Much more than
the earth's orbits of the sun, time is profoundly a human event where we are stretched through the fabric of our own life and bodies,
remembering where we have been, those we have been with, and anticipating to whom will we
go as bodily creatures. It is the bodily relationship of time which
makes it much, much more than the sequence of clock days. Our bodies spread out behind and before us
invisibly, but nevertheless in a very real and concrete way, yearning
for the world of love which can complete them. So it is our human time is now
supercharged with the future of the gospel, bending us toward the
infinite wound of compassion opened by Christ in history: what might
be called the "black hole" of a new creation formed purely by love.
The art that recognizes this is perhaps not fully born. But, then again, perhaps it is
partially present in an exhibition like "0 to 60", with hints
of compassion scattered among the fragments of time. One particular exhibit was a replica house made of see-through gauze, with table, chairs, sink, toilet etc. It was not hard to imagine a gaze of compassion dissolving those opaque walls, opening them up to an inconceivable future.
Tony Bartlett, T&P Contributing Theologian
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