Most academic books are books about books, and theological tomes are no exception. They draw on, refer to and criticise what has been written in previous books, and on this basis draw (hopefully new) conclusions. But because of this even the new field of theology of the body can inhabit an actually very cerebral world. You could write a really radical theology of the body constructed in fact from only mental abstractions rather than physical experience. Indeed, Balthasar, widely credited with rediscovering the beautiful for theology, and while very practically sensitive to the arts (he was an accomplished pianist), was in fact more concerned with the spiritual beauty of God's actions as recorded in the words of the Bible, than with finding God in concretely beautiful things. Of course, in reflecting on our experiences of beauty and what makes them beautiful we can apply this to salvation history: but this is a very abstracted kind of transcendence possible for only the well-educated, and one which risks leaving the physical (and most people) behind.
It is thus hard to avoid wondering if the perceived irrelevance of Christianity to the dominant West European culture is not due to the unwitting withdrawal of Christianity from artistic creation into intellectual abstraction. If so, then David Brown's book could not be more timely. The second of a trilogy on the question of religious experience through culture and the arts (the first was God and the Enchantment of Place), God and Grace of Body is a direct exploration of the body, be it “beautiful and sexy” or “ugly and wasted” in painting and sculpture, through to dance, food and drink, and a long discussion of music of every genre, which together provide a basis of revisiting Christ's bodily presence in the Eucharist and the liturgy. This last section prepares the way for the final book, Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama, due for publication this year, in which Brown will seek to recover theatre and rhetoric in liturgy and preaching.
There is of course nothing original about seeing art as incarnational. But what is really refreshing about this book is that it goes directly to the artistic creations themselves. Brown discusses, in an accessible style, everything from Bernini's sculptures, Matisse's “The Dance” (on the dust jacket, and currently on display at the Royal Academy) and Frederick Ashton's ballets, to Mahler's symphonies and Led Zeppelin. (Indeed, it is greatly to Brown's credit that he admits in the preface to previously having been prejudiced against dance as an art form.) Furthermore, Brown will not merely have Christians “accept” art as able to provide transcendent experience – I hear the symphony and it makes me think of God, and thereby I move on from it. He demands that we open ourselves to the possibility that in hearing the symphony we may actually experience God's presence. He is careful to show that this is not really a new idea: as Hugo Rahner had argued in Man at Play (although Brown does not seem to know this fascinating little book) the very fact that Christian theologians sometimes speak of the Trinity as a dance is itself an endorsement of the spiritual value of dance, and thus he concludes that to use the metaphor and then to be suspicious of dance itself, as many Christian churches are, is to put the cart before the horse. Indeed, he speaks of the dance which is still performed by the altar boys in Seville cathedral (p.86), and the dance/ball game played at Easter in French cathedrals until the end of the 16th century. Hence as well as challenging nervous Christians Brown also calls into question the common modern perception that such practices were “mere” remnants or accommodations of pre-Christian festivals. On this principle he is able to overcome Christian anxiety and secular sniggers at the eroticism of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by suggesting that Baroque Christian culture was at home with sexual attraction as potentially mediating experience of the divine without envisaging sexual union.
There is an obvious problem with all this, and it is not mere Puritanism or fear of pantheism. While it is true that we may find even quite secular art spiritually uplifting, one person's meat is another person's poison. Beauty does not automatically manifest the divine, still less the Christian God. There are plenty of music-lovers who are firm atheists, and indeed even with explicitly sacred art it is often the case that “We had the experience but missed the meaning”, as T.S. Eliot said. But the fact that Brown insists on the widest inclusion of music (Bruckner's symphonies for their meditation on suffering, Messiaen's strong sense of the resurrection, Gospel music and Bob Dylan) shows that he is well aware that different art speaks to different people. He is explicit that “God is experienced in the everyday but always greater than any experience or conception of him” (p.428), and counter-culturally insists that we accept the ugly and wasted body too as a physical sign of the fruits of our sin against others and sometimes a sign of suffering in which the very wasting of the body reveals a process of spiritual transformation. This harmonises well with a Christian aesthetics that argues that precisely the ambiguity of art provides a space in which God can be God to us, not merely our (or the artist's) conception of Him. The apophatic as well as the cataphatic.
More controversial is Brown's exploration of art in other religions and his call that Christians engage even with critique of Christianity, such as in Schubert's attitude to death in the Winterreise, or the focus on drug and gun culture in gangsta rap. While he is right that the churches often shy away from these things, his sometimes rather liberal view of the contribution of human fallibility to the content of the Scriptures risks too easily reducing a theology of mystery and otherness, in which art can be very much at home, to aesthetic agnosticism.
This is not to denigrate what is otherwise a fine and challenging book. Thousands of people attend yoga and Tai Chi classes, but Christianity has little to say, beyond transcendent abstraction, about that aspect of the salvation/healing of the body. Brown does not actually deal with clothing specifically, but I'm sure that if I suggested that we needed a theology of fashion I'd raise more than a few giggles. This just shows how far we have declined from the centuries when the Church was in the vanguard of art, rather than its suspicious critic and sometimes timid user. In response to the current cultural renaissance in Britain three creativity has revived in the churches, but it is not infrequently pallid “Christian art”, message before content. Yet if we heed Brown's message to be prayerfully open to the experience of God in beautiful things rather than merely to their transcendent value, we have a better chance of producing truly grace-ful art.
