The Artistic Sphere: The Arts in Neo-Calvinist Perspective
I was a senior in college when I first encountered Modern Art and the Death of a Culture by the Calvinist scholar Hans Rookmaaker.1 I was studying art history at the Courtauld Institute in London; the book was lent to me by a local youth minister. I vividly remember processing the book’s jarring title and its even more jarring cover illustration: one of the modern artist Francis Bacon’s famous “screaming popes.” These melting, anguished deconstructions of genteel, Baroque-era portraiture frankly proclaimed the death of religion and the meaninglessness of life. Indeed Bacon, apropos of his name, famously declared, “we are meat.”2
Rookmaaker’s core argument in Modern Art and the Death of a Culture was simple: modern “high” art (known for its challenging, alienating, abstract approaches) was symptomatic of culture-wide spiritual malaise. Recovery depended on a renewed “understanding” that came from “the Reformation . . . the Bible’s view of life.”3 Naturally, a culture developing according to atheistic premises would reach a depressing dead end, bereft of a sense of nature’s (and humanity’s) complexity and dignity. Abstract art was the sorry fruit of this development, and it had been foreshadowed by the reductive work of artists like Poussin, Monet, and Gauguin, whose works were steps in a gradual movement away from “biblical” sight. However, broad-scale worldview correction was possible. Rookmaaker’s book, in fact, was a rallying cry to restore the “Bible’s view of life” (as defined by the Protestant Reformation) to the heart of modern culture.
Rookmaaker’s sweeping interpretation of modern art history, albeit deeply unfashionable in its dismissal of cutting-edge artists, was bracing for its unabashed Christian perspective. In fact, it was the first explicitly Christian approach to the subject I’d ever seen! Naturally, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture became a launchpad and reference point for me, as it did for many others. Its enduring hold on the Christian imagination is exemplified by the 2016 IVP book Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, which took Rookmaaker’s book as a (controversial, equivocal) starting point.4
This year, IVP has published The Artistic Sphere: The Arts in Neo-Calvinist Perspective, edited by the arts researcher Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker (Hans Rookmaaker’s daughter) and the philosopher Roger D. Henderson. The book situates Hans Rookmaaker’s famous contentions within a wider Neo-Calvinist theological context, drawing attention to important thinkers perhaps less well-known to art world professionals. The book’s chapters hail from many decades, tracing a stream in Calvinist thought beginning with Calvin himself and extending into the present. Together, they tell an intriguing story of aesthetic struggle in the modern world. For the book’s authors, “the Bible’s view of life”—that is, a thoroughgoing Christian worldview—was authentically mapped during Europe’s Protestant Reformation, particularly by Calvin and his followers. Christianity’s task since then has been to integrate the various “spheres” of human achievement into this new, Reformed schema. The present book’s title, The Artistic Sphere, accordingly, bespeaks its goal: to map how artistic achievement, per se, can be integrated into a “biblical” view of reality.
Toward this end, The Artistic Sphere is divided into four sections. The first section, “Roots,” lays a historical and theological groundwork for Neo-Calvinist aesthetic thought. Here, starting with the tabula rasa established by John Calvin (who supported the destruction of preexisting cultural forms), the authors trace the emergence of an authentically Protestant art in Calvin’s Geneva and its descendants. While the earliest Calvinist art evolved somewhat unconsciously, later thinkers gave language to the Calvinist cultural project. Foremost among them were the polymath Abraham Kuyper and the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, whose principles are introduced and explained in this section’s second part.
The remaining sections of the book, “Art History,” “Aesthetics,” and “Theology and Art” collect essays by specialists working downstream of the Kuyperian thought prepared and mapped in the book’s first section. E. John Walford’s chapter “The Vocation of a Christian Art Historian” traces the author’s long, distinguished career in the discipline of art history, focusing on approaches that support a biblical worldview. In “The Halo of Human Imaginativity,” the philosopher Calvin Seerveld suggests that biblical stewardship of God’s creation, across all its domains, naturally demands human imagination and design; this means everyone’s vocation can cross, Venn-diagram-like, into the “Artistic Sphere.” And in “Fifty Plus Years of Art and Theology: 1970 to Today,” journalist Victoria Emily Jones traces recent developments in Calvinist (and more broadly Protestant) aesthetic circles, highlighting the continued usefulness of Neo-Calvinist theology for today’s Protestant creators. Appropriately, Hans Rookmaaker is represented as well. His essay “Art, Meaning and Truth” models a process of finding biblical meaning in historical artworks.
Naturally, The Artistic Sphere begs a lot of questions. With its subtitle invoking Neo-Calvinism, this is to be expected: there is little discussion of what actually constitutes a “biblical worldview” and who is qualified to map its terrain. The book is therefore liberated to get straight to its point: defining “The Artistic Sphere,” developing theory for its proper outworking, and celebrating successful exercises therein. In the area of theory development The Artistic Sphere is particularly fascinating, for it seems to leverage distinctively “modernist” aesthetic ideas (of the type deplored by Rookmaaker) toward what could be seen as “anti-modernist” ends. This tension can at times feel like “fighting fire with fire;” at other times, it can seem like savvy bridge-building.
So what exactly is “The Artistic Sphere,” and how have artists and thinkers leveraged this idea to inspire their work? For the thinker and politician Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), from whose thought this book’s title derives, “art [is] an aspect of life with a raison d’etre and integrity of its own” (47). The “Artistic Sphere,” therefore, can be thought of as a circumscribed field of achievement, designed by God, into which humans (and especially those humans we call “artists”) are invited to pour their energies. Its alphabet is nothing other than sensations we harvest from God’s creation: “birdsong, the colors of the sky, and the fragrance of the flowers” (47). From these things, human artists extract aesthetic tools to create excellent new tributes to God’s glory. According to Kuyper’s follower, the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, these ready-made aesthetic tools are implicit in creation, waiting to be distilled, and they naturally activate structures within the artist’s God-given psychology. Accordingly, art can be defined as “a harmonious objectification of an intentional (imagined) arrangement in the artist’s mind” (68, quoting Dooyeweerd). Dooyeweerd’s delineation of an “artistic sphere” complements his postulation of other spheres of human achievement, including the “economic,” “social,” and “juridical.” Each of these “spheres” has a real existence that descends to give order to the material world, and each one activates latent structures in the human intellect.
The theological postulation of an “Artistic Sphere” is interesting from the point of view of academic art history. This is because, since its establishment as a discipline in the 1800s, “art history” has struggled to define the object of its inquiry. In the late nineteenth century, for example, a methodological rift developed between scholars in the German tradition, who tended to think of “Art” as an essentially spiritual product of “worldview,” and scholars in the Italian tradition, who were more focused on appreciating craftsmanship and tracing authorship. Accordingly, German scholars wrote more of “Art,” with a capital “A,” while Italian scholars wrote of “the arts” broadly speaking, defined as historical skill sets and their techniques (e.g. fresco painting, metalworking, textile weaving). Implicit in this rift was the question of whether Art, per se, existed at all, or whether it was merely a convenient human construct. By the late twentieth century, conceptual artists were methodically challenging various definitions of “Art with a capital A” by manufacturing provocative limit cases. Is a profound idea a work of art? Is an artwork anything chosen for an “art museum”? Can looking at something “artfully” make it “Art,” even contrary to its maker’s intention? This is why, by 1987, the art historian Hans Belting would posit “the end of the history of art”—by which he meant the end of the capital-A concept that had dominated the art world for a couple of centuries.5
The secular “capital-A Art” that Belting eulogized strikes me as being very similar to the “Artistic Sphere” posited by Kuyper and his followers. Though not avowedly Christian, it was founded on a vague spirituality that identified a particular realm for “Art,” that deployed forms distilled from nature, and that elevated artists as inspired possessors of a transformative vocation. In the late nineteenth century, the painter James McNeill Whistler famously declared that “nature sings her exquisite song to the artist alone”—suggesting that “artist” was a kind of mystical, divinely-ordained calling.6 At the same time, he titled his paintings “symphonies” to emphasize their abstract, “spiritual” design qualities (akin to the beauties of wordless music) above their secondary, utilitarian functions (e.g., to record an appearance or tell a story). Whistler’s postulation of a transcendent artistic realm caught on. Accordingly, a few generations later, the Marxist art critic Clement Greenberg would insist that great art must become fully entrenched within its “area of competence.”7 For Greenberg this “entrenchment” inevitably led to artistic abstraction, with its focus on pure, content-less form and color. Thanks to its freedom from secondary functions, abstract art alone evaded contamination from specious, oppressive belief systems. Greenberg’s “area of competence” uncannily recalls Kuyper’s “raison d’etre and integrity of its own.” Along parallel tracks, secular avant-gardists and Neo-Calvinists insisted on a bounded “artistic sphere.”
The words of Calvinists like Kuyper on the one hand, and secular “formalists” like Greenberg on the other, can sometimes seem interchangeable. However, Kuyper and Greenberg would certainly have disagreed concerning the “area of competence” contained in the “Artistic Sphere.” For Kuyper (and for Rookmaaker, who worked out Kuyper’s ideas through art criticism) the artist was like a “true seer” who accurately recorded the God-made glory of Creation. Thinkers like Whistler and Greenberg, however, didn’t spread the net so wide. Mindful of the composite nature of traditional, pictorial art (often beholden in its subject matter to other “spheres” like history, theology, geology, and anatomy), they went several steps further. Their uncompromising efforts to define an “artistic sphere” that was truly itself, with its own self-contained set of rules, resulted in conceptual purification of such refined austerity that it often alienated those outside the “Art World.”
Greenberg and Whistler were “purifiers” who pushed their cleansing logic to its inevitable conclusion. So, arguably, were the other great modernists criticized by Hans Rookmaaker, including Monet and Gauguin. Viewed superficially, these champions of abstraction seem to have little in common with Calvinists who preferred 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. However, it is precisely a thrust toward conceptual “purification” that neo-Calvinism and secular formalism share, in essence if not in degree. For both neo-Calvinism and formalist “modernism” are intrinsically, well, modern. That is, their quests for clean, new theoretical grounds of human activity are testimony to their shared roots in early modern European history.
The word “culture” is anchored in the notion of “cultivation,” which itself implies rootedness, gradualism, organicism, generational continuity, “depth” and embeddedness. Modernity, on the other hand, is practically defined by its interruption of this continuity. Indeed, many modern nation builders understood that traditional culture posed a major challenge to the adoption of new, more enlightened, ideals. The starry-eyed architects of early modern “utopian” communities, religious or otherwise, knew the same. This, indeed, is why some of Europe’s most zealous religious reformers struck out for the “tabula rasa” of the so-called New World. This is why the intellectual masterminds of the French Revolution devised a “Cult of Reason” to forcefully replace the existing Catholic-agrarian folk culture. And this is why Mao Zedong found it necessary to launch a history-erasing “Cultural Revolution” in Communist China.
The “Cult of Reason” and the “Cultural Revolution” are, of course, extreme examples of “modernist” purification, but they can help us understand why the visual culture we call “modern” is of a markedly different character than anything humans produced in the thousands of years that came before. With the modern world there came abstract art, critical theory, and absurdism. With the modern world there came unbelievably rapid stylistic flux yielding myriad other “isms” (e.g., Impressionism, Cubism) replacing each other on a regular basis. These movements were, in part, attempts to apply top-down philosophical reasoning to aesthetic experience in the same way top-down reasoning had already been applied in religion (e.g., the radical reforms of Calvin) and politics (e.g., the establishment of French and North American democracies). They were also attempts to discover a domain for “Art” that could weather the turbulence of revolutions, wars, and world-changing technologies. Above all, these modernist “isms” (of which Hans Rookmaaker was not generally fond) were attempts to keep “doing culture” while explicitly rejecting millennia of cultivation. Where continuity had been interrupted, or even declared anathema, new, “pure” grounds were always posited, until they, too, were declared corrupt or obsolete.
I think the word “Art” was only, ever, a useful abstraction cobbled from a desire to compete with the past—and surpass it. “Certain things existed,” the modern theorists of “Art” said, “and they were desirable. How do we name them and manufacture them—and even outdo them?” In this effort to name, analyze, and surpass, many things informally called the “arts” (that is, the “skill sets”) of, say, tempera painting, stone carving, and metalworking all became “Art”—decontextualized, mythologized, and reified. Originally, these craft forms had been products of “corrupt,” context-bound, traditional cultivation; for modernity, they had to be distilled into something purified, rule-based, and new. And amazingly, just as their own distillation may have been caused by religious division and the need to extirpate traditions, they themselves became the seeds of new religions! For in their search for transcendent, ahistorical grounds for beauty, modern art movements like Orphism and Surrealism (among many others) actually became new belief systems, complete with theologies, dogmas, and spiritual practices. This is because—I believe—the composite, provisional, multi-faceted nature of the thing we call “Art” must, in the end, re-root itself or die. Bucking against the limits of its purely conceptual existence, it longs to return to the soil of holistic human striving from which it, Golem-like, was once formed.
That is why my favorite essay in The Artistic Sphere is by the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. In his chapter “Rethinking Art,” Wolterstorff argues that capital-A “Art,” as we think of it, doesn’t really, in fact, exist. Instead, it is the product of an Enlightenment-era “grand narrative” that elevated objects of contemplation as lodestars amidst the turmoil of early modernity. By extracting these “disinterested” objects of contemplation from the fabric of daily life, early modern elites created a realm of aspiration and escape that helped them navigate rapid social change. They then encoded this realm into an infrastructure of museums, academies, and institutes designed to produce and perpetuate even more objects of “disinterested” contemplation. Today, however, this Enlightenment-era initiative no longer seems so compelling, and the many other uses of “Art” are reemerging. These include political statement-making, public commemoration, cathartic expression, and more. Wolterstorff, therefore, encourages us to free ourselves from a “grand narrative” that privileges a disinterested, sequestered “Art” so that we can understand and embrace the other contexts in which aesthetic reasoning can be fruitfully deployed (214–224).
For me, Wolterstorff is moving in a healthy direction. Certainly, the walled-off, commodified, prestige-centered “Art World” as we know it is shifting and perhaps crumbling. Objects created for sacred or memorial purposes are being repatriated to their original contexts. Meanwhile folk, traditional, and craft-based practices are gaining renewed esteem. The artificiality of the “Art” construct is increasingly recognized, and this means that “makers”—people driven to create—are both considering new outlets for their energy and shrugging off oppressive regimes of ranking and conceptual boundary-drawing. What do these broad, secular trends mean for the existence of a Calvinist “Aesthetic Sphere”?
Among the authors in this book, Wolterstorff certainly seems most poised to answer this question. But I feel he may be kicking the problem down the road. Toward the end of his essay, amidst a discussion of his book Art Rethought,8 Wolterstorff seems to replace one, large, top-down construct (i.e., capital A “Art”) with several smaller ones, including “art-reflexive art” and “polemical art” (221–222). This goes a long way toward acknowledging the power of context, but I fear such conceptual slicing only delays the inevitable. Is it productive, for example, to separate “polemical art” from “polemics,” full stop? And if we do, are we resurrecting a shadow definition of “Art” with a capital “A”? Perhaps I should read Wolterstorff’s book to find out.
For me, the venerated art historian Ernst Gombrich hit the nail on the head when he declared, “There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists.”9 In the end, I believe, there are no transcendent spheres of formal achievement that descend to give meaning and shape to our actions. Instead, there is a world of individuals made in the image of God, endowed with inborn energies and charisms that can be applied in myriad creative, historically contingent ways. As an “art historian,” I investigate how these energies are expressed visually, impacting our experience as sighted beings, replete with a specific visual psychology and visually-configured way of parsing meaning. And as a Christian “art historian,” I examine how these dynamics of visual experience interface with the metaphors of Scripture (invoking light, sight, visions, mirrors, suns, stars, and crystal seas) to coax us holistically and completely toward union with God, the source and summit of our being. For me, “Art with a capital A” was a temporary experiment in human visual communication that has seen its day. But humans everywhere still use (and always have used) visual means to navigate reality.
Metaphor is the bread and butter of theology. God is greater than our concepts, and all the cultivation in the world, drawing on millennia of deep, lived understanding about the physics of Creation, the phenomenology of human experience and the mysteries of the creative gesture, will never be enough to “capture” Him in his fullness. An empathetic re-engagement with ancient traditions, however, can help us expand our spiritual lexicon in our quest to deeply know and enjoy the Maker and Sustainer of All. Insofar as the Neo-Calvinist tradition charted in The Artistic Sphere sloughs off regimes of distillation, purification, and the reification of mere concepts, it promises rapprochement with jettisoned traditions and cultural reunification of the Christian—and human—family. This will yield, from the grassroots up, greater ecumenical understanding. For I believe that a reclaimed embeddedness in nature, tradition, history, and cultivation, with the metaphors and rhythms that emanate therefrom, can help all of us come onto the same page—a Scriptural page! By this means, we can renew the global Body of Christ in our turbulent, questioning, questing postmodern world.
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Footnotes
- Hans Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (Crossway, 1994).
- Francis Bacon interviewed by Davis Sylvester,” Blog del arte de la pintura, accessed September 19, 2024, https://blog.artedv.com/francis-bacon-interviewed-by-david-sylvester/.
- Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, 26.
- Jonathan A. Anderson and William A. Dyrness, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture (IVP Academic, 2016).
- Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, trans. C. S. Wood (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
- James McNeill Whistler, “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock” (lecture, Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly, UK, February 20, 1885), https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/miscellany/tenoclock/.
- Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Beacon, 1961), 3–21, https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.edu/dist/d/1838/files/2015/01/Greenberg-Clement-Avant-Garde-and-Kitsch-copy.pdf. This article was first published in The Partisan Review (1939).
- Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (Oxford University Press, 2015).
- Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art (Phaidon, 1995), 15.
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