- Mar 26, 2021
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I was just thinking about cathedrals.
Imagine that you're a mediaeval peasant. Your life is populated by the quaint, and the perfectly unremarkable. Squat buildings, thatched roofs, perhaps a stone manor with a turreted tower or two. Every year however you make a pilgrimage to the local cathedral. You exchange dirt tracks, pitted stone and rotting wood for soaring crenellations, infinite resonance and scintillating glass.
Cathedrals would have carried a visual weight that we can't possibly understand today. It seems that all the churches have abandoned this commitment to the sublime. Most of our churches today are functional.
This has extended into the way in which we create religious art in general. Compare 'Confessions' or 'the Windhover' to any number of modern devotionals and inspirational poems.
I'm not really talking about beauty though that is part of it. I'm talking about the sublime- dynamical and mathematical. We don't create religious art which has psychological, moral, aeshtetic and spiritual power. The sad comparison is Hillsong and Hildegard.
Why is this? Kant describes the dynamical sublime with visions of ' threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanos in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river'.
In the modern period of art making I think that Coltrane really approaches this. It is music which thunders on every sense organ. A Love Supreme is the album which reaches the pinnacle of human artistic endeavour. For me anyway.Art should make us feel like we have been taken to the limits of imagination.
Even if we take Tavener and Part who I admire profoundly, there is still a sense of impossible depth and scale. It doesn't have to have decibels and pyrotechnics!
I feel that there is lost potential here. Why did God create the 'vault of heaven' and the 'boundless ocean' if He didn't want us to draw them in and in some way reproduce them. In doing so we participate in God's creative activity and are thus drawn closer to Him.
The ancient Jews will always be the epitome of this. The Ark of the Covenant, the Tabernacle, the Old Testament songs and poetry. God chose to communicate using the sublime. They make it cear that God wants us to engage these faculties. The tragedy is that we have left our generation with nothing to inculcate a sense of the sublime. Marilynne Robinson, Part, Tavener and others give me hope, but I feel that the church needs to reclaim the sublime. The capacity to comprehend and appreciate it is a neglected gift I feel.
Imagine that you're a mediaeval peasant. Your life is populated by the quaint, and the perfectly unremarkable. Squat buildings, thatched roofs, perhaps a stone manor with a turreted tower or two. Every year however you make a pilgrimage to the local cathedral. You exchange dirt tracks, pitted stone and rotting wood for soaring crenellations, infinite resonance and scintillating glass.
Cathedrals would have carried a visual weight that we can't possibly understand today. It seems that all the churches have abandoned this commitment to the sublime. Most of our churches today are functional.
This has extended into the way in which we create religious art in general. Compare 'Confessions' or 'the Windhover' to any number of modern devotionals and inspirational poems.
I'm not really talking about beauty though that is part of it. I'm talking about the sublime- dynamical and mathematical. We don't create religious art which has psychological, moral, aeshtetic and spiritual power. The sad comparison is Hillsong and Hildegard.
Why is this? Kant describes the dynamical sublime with visions of ' threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanos in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river'.
In the modern period of art making I think that Coltrane really approaches this. It is music which thunders on every sense organ. A Love Supreme is the album which reaches the pinnacle of human artistic endeavour. For me anyway.Art should make us feel like we have been taken to the limits of imagination.
Even if we take Tavener and Part who I admire profoundly, there is still a sense of impossible depth and scale. It doesn't have to have decibels and pyrotechnics!
I feel that there is lost potential here. Why did God create the 'vault of heaven' and the 'boundless ocean' if He didn't want us to draw them in and in some way reproduce them. In doing so we participate in God's creative activity and are thus drawn closer to Him.
The ancient Jews will always be the epitome of this. The Ark of the Covenant, the Tabernacle, the Old Testament songs and poetry. God chose to communicate using the sublime. They make it cear that God wants us to engage these faculties. The tragedy is that we have left our generation with nothing to inculcate a sense of the sublime. Marilynne Robinson, Part, Tavener and others give me hope, but I feel that the church needs to reclaim the sublime. The capacity to comprehend and appreciate it is a neglected gift I feel.
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