Christ and the Work of the Artist

What is the role of the artist? Priest-poet Malcolm Guite uses some lines from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to explain. (See the quoted section below from Act V, Scene 1, lines 5-18.) He shared these thoughts at a recent seminar at Duke Divinity School.

Good art should move us between between mystery and understanding. The artist's job is to place us between apprehension and comprehension. If we cannot apprehend a work of art at all, meaning that it lies completely beyond our grasp of understanding, then it is meaningless to us. However, if we fully understand a poem, song, or painting -- that is, we totally comprehend it -- then it is dull, trite, or banal. (Pick up a greeting card and read it's poetry. Probably not very mysterious.)

Jacob's Ladder, a sculpture in iron

The artist is called to shuttle us between understanding and mystery -- from comprehension to apprehension and back again. Or in the words of Shakespeare below, from heaven to earth, and earth to heaven. Each artist uses a form (such as poem, a film, a piece of music, or a sculpture) to take us from something we can understand so that we can be drawn to mystery that sits beyond our grasp.

What person in history "bodies forth" this bridge between heaven and earth?

Then he said, “I tell you the truth, you will all see heaven open and the angels of God going up and down on the Son of Man, the one who is the stairway between heaven and earth.”  - John 1:51

Christ is the living, enfleshed bridge between earth and heaven. He allows allows us to glance toward God by linking heavenly mysteries to earthly realities that we can comprehend. By coming in human-ness he started with something that is comprehensible -- a living, breathing, talking person. Then through his death and resurrection he drew us to try to apprehend the amazing mysteries of God.

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Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.