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.”
Editor’s Note: This review essay originally appeared in the print journal as an uninterrupted essay. We have divided it into two parts for our blog. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.
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).
