Sacrament and Art and Stickley Recliners

Sacrament is the overlapping of heaven and earth expressed in a visible fashion. Defined in this way, all of nature is sacramental, because God’s presence is everywhere-present (omnipresent) in nature. And so the Apostle Paul says that men are without excuse who deny God, because his presence is everywhere evident in creation.

This presence of God is added to in the New Testament by the unique development of God-become-man, Jesus Christ, coming into the word. It says that Christ tabernacles (the word means to dwell) among men. This localizes the everywhere-present presence of God in a way that does not compromise His everywhere-present presence. This localization of God-with-us is one reason for art.

At least it is one opportunity for art. We make art to celebrate the localized presence of heaven on earth.

Now, this truth raises enormous problems in relation to Christian practice. I am referring to religious images. The Eastern Church has long held that religious images – icons – are a special form of art because of their ability to convey the viewer into the divine presence. The Western Church’s view of this matter is a lot more complicated. On the one hand it rejected the Eastern view, holding that physical images of the divine amount to idols. On the other hand the history of Western Christianity (Protestantism aside which, after all, is a recent development) is filled with religious objects. We would not have art history, and we would not have architecture history as most people understand it, without art sanctioned by Western Christianity.

(In other words, I would not have a job as a professor of architecture, of art, of philosophy of aesthetics, and of all of that other stuff for which there are no grant monies to go after; but I digress).

Now add to this Protestantism, which historically has been the most vocal against religious images of any kind, and we have the ambivalent attitude most Christians today have towards art in relation to the practice of their faith.

And the consequence of this is a disjuncture between anything that is material-physical with Christian life. Because I am Protestant, I am mostly thinking of my peers in this category. Whatever worship is, it has little to do with the materiality of our lives. We have mental images of “worship” as something done on a Sunday morning, standing up and sitting down when told to do so by the guy with the guitar up front, and singing pre-printed songs. Many wear jeans and flip-flops; at some places it is de rigueur for the preacher man to wear casual clothing; I have even heard of Mickey Mouse shirts.

And the architectural space in which this activity takes place matters NIL.

The historian Johan Huizinga, in his The Waning of the Middle Ages, makes a key observation about religious images.

“The spirit of the Middle Ages … longs to give concrete shape to every conception. Every thought seeks expression in an image, but in this image it solidifies and becomes rigid. By this tendency to embodiment in visible forms all holy concepts are constantly exposed to the danger of hardening into mere externalism. For in assuming a figurative shape thought loses its ethereal and vague qualities, and pious feeling is apt to resolve itself in the image.”

The Eastern tradition of being conveyed into the divine presence by icons stresses the moment of encounter. Ideally, at that moment, the materiality of the art object goes away. Thus the art-thing is not an object of veneration, as the Western criticism would have it. But on the other hand, the art-thing is there, with its candles and incense and all the rest of it. And to the one who is not in the moment, it is, problematically, a religious something or other with no actual power.

My point is that true sacramentalism can never be resident in objects alone. It must begin in the heart, a heart hungry for the moment of being in tune with heaven’s presence on earth. And heaven’s presence not only in a general way, but in a Christ way, in which he is here, with me, in this place, at this time, in this nice Stickley recliner on which I am writing. In moments like this, whether it is in front of an art object or whether it is sitting at meal, or whether it is writing these thoughts, sacrament and art meet, because heaven and earth meet.

For the possibility of these moments, I set my table with honor and care; I work on my art with expectation; I look out at the nature around me with quiet humility; I treat all men with eager expectations of honor and redemption.

And I am blessed by this Stickley recliner not as a haughty display of “taste” in expensive furniture, but because it is of an excellence that is becoming for the moment in which You are with me.

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Romans 1.20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

John 1.14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages [1942], Doubleday Anchor, 1954, page 152.