Tag Archives: The Truth and Beauty

Religion, Uncategorized

More on art: Trying to think above my weight class

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Photo credit: Evie Fjord. Unsplash license.

Still haven’t finished the book I’m reading, so you get further puerile musings on art tonight.

I have read Andrew Klavan’s The Truth and Beauty twice, and I’m still not sure I understand it. I kind of suspect that’s the point of the book – that art is essentially an effort to convey an experience that can’t be pinned down in words. You “catch” it or you don’t. Kind of like Zen, I suppose, though I hate to use that comparison.

But my point (I think) is that art is mysterious and evasive. There are formulas, but they never really touch the heart of the thing. It’s what C.S. Lewis called “Joy” in Surprised by Joy, and he linked it with Romanticism – which, not coincidentally, is what The Truth and Beauty is also about.

I watched one of Klavan’s interviews on YouTube the other day, and (if my memory is correct) he said he talked about the value of Pi and Fibonacci’s theorem in TTAB. He said that Pi expresses itself in Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, which, he maintained, suggests that the Trinity itself is expressed in creation. Every living thing around us, from the smallest single-cell animal to the human and the elephant, develops according to that ratio. The leaves of the trees tend to grow in tripartite forms. Fractals create three-part shapes, leading to astonishingly naturalistic digital images.

The value of Pi – the number three plus a little more. Three, but not a static three. There’s some mystery added, a little extra to surprise us and keep us off balance.

Theologians have scoffed at the legend of St. Patrick teaching the Irish about the Trinity by showing them a three-leaf clover. “Bad analogy,” they say.

But what if the clover expresses the Trinity in a more profound way? Not as an analogy, but as an artifact? The metaphorical fingerprints of the Potter in the clay vessel He has created?

I think this Fibonacci stuff may be one reason why I was never a good artist, back when I was young and dreamed of making a living with pencil and brush. An art teacher in high school once told me I was good at symmetry, and that pleased me. But symmetry isn’t what you want in art, I think, most of the time. You want dynamism –a sense of movement, if only the movement of the viewer’s eye.

I missed that Fibonacci knack – dividing things into threes, creating a compelling imbalance. My work just sat there. (Among its other failings.) I always think of a panel from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip that impressed me – Hobbes leaps at Calvin, and the line of his body and tail is so elegant that you can feel the motion. I could never draw a line like that, though I wanted to very much.

Anyway, I guess it all goes back to a basic disconnect between our impoverished age and the past (the break came during the World Wars, I think). The old artists believed they were expressing God (or even pagan gods), and sought to recreate beauty. Nowadays, artists only think they’re expressing themselves – and they believe themselves to be cosmic accidents (bad for the environment too).

Christians are capable of producing really great art. Subcreation. Genuine, God-reflecting beauty. We’ve done it in the past. And our competition is occupying itself taping bananas to walls. It should be an easy contest.

But we need a) to take art seriously, and b) to encourage our talent.

Authors, Reading, Religion

Hubristic musings on Story

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Photo credit: Infralist.com. Unsplash license.

Let’s see. Where am I? I did a Zoom interview with a student from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay this morning. Some kind of history class assignment. She was supposed to speak with a more impressive Viking reenactor, but had to settle for me due to a glitch in the system. It was nice. She was an intelligent young person. Gave me hope.

I’m trying to figure out Adobe Indesign (not Light Desk, as I erroneously termed it last night; I saw the I and D logo in my mind, and they looked like an L and a D, so I vamped). I was referred to a YouTube video for an introduction, but that created as much confusion as it cleared up for me. I bought a book, which I shall try out this evening. I intend to learn this irrational, user-unfriendly mouse maze of an app, or die in the attempt.

Packed for my trip to Brainerd tomorrow. Paid my bills a day early, because I’m flexible that way. Walked to the post office for stamps.

But what shall I blog about? I think, on consideration, that I still have things to say about Story as a key to the universe, as if I didn’t overtalk my intelligence in my previous post on the subject.

Dale Nelson, in commenting on that post, noted that our Lord, when He came to earth, did not come as a philosopher, but as a storyteller. This is an excellent point, one I wish I’d thought of.

So I’ll double down. When God chose to reveal Himself to us in written form, He did not give us a book of systematic theology (I’ve often wished He had, but oddly He did not consult me). Instead, He told us a story.

Wouldn’t it have been a relief if the Bible had begun with The Book of Epistemology? We could have a Book of Trinitarian Doctrine, and a Book of Soteriology, and it would all end up with a Book of Eschatology.

The Quran is kind of like that, as best I understand it, based on my limited examination of the book, though it’s not very organized. The Quran is essentially a book of doctrines and commands. It’s not what you’d call a gripping narrative.

The Bible we’ve been given, however, is a narrative. God chose to tell what is essentially a story. There’s other elements in there – poetry, and law, and wisdom literature, etc. But it’s all set within an epic dramatic narrative. The world is created, Man is created, Man falls, Man runs berserk, God begins calling out a series of individuals, then a family, then a nation, through whom He will – gradually – reveal His purposes for redemption. Finally the Hero – God Himself in human form – appears and – through great sacrifice – undoes the Fall, conquers death and the devil. Finally, we’re given a glimpse of Christ’s ultimate triumph and the eucatastrophe.

A lot of church schism and religious war could have been avoided if we’d had a divine book of unambiguous theology instead of the Bible we got. But God hasn’t chosen to reveal Himself that way, either in His written Word or in His incarnate Word. He seems to prefer stories. And stories tend to be so… ambivalent. The better the story, the harder it is to explain.

During my recent long road trips, I decided to splurge on a couple audio books. Both were by Andrew Klavan – books I’d read before but wanted to revisit. My Minot book was The Truth and the Beauty, Klavan’s manifesto of art-oriented theology. My Green Bay book was The Great Good Thing, his spiritual autobiography.

I found The Great Good Thing easier to grasp. It’s a straight memoir, with its lessons fairly obvious. Great story, too.

But The Truth and Beauty, though fascinating and inspiring, eludes me at some points. Even after two readings, I still have a hard time articulating what the point of the book is. It’s mostly about how the Romantic poets followed their perceptions of beauty, which led them (in some cases not very far) towards the truth of Christianity in a world gone apostate.

But I can’t grasp the nub. I can’t tell you what Klavan is trying to say we need to learn from the Romantic poets.

And it occurs to me that’s the whole mystery of the thing.

Great art generally can’t be reduced to a formula or a moral. It leads you to a place where you confront an idea that is a Person. And persons can’t be defined – not within the limits of human reason. (God can define it all, I have no doubt.)

It’s a little like Zen, where you sit around and meditate until you “get” some irrational concept. I reject Zen, and I reject the irrational too. But the Buddhists have an inkling of some truth there.

Stories can lead us to an encounter with God. Reason can too. But neither the story nor reason automatically produce faith. The faith comes from an encounter with Jesus Christ. That encounter is a miracle; St. Paul knew, and the theologians have agreed, that it’s nothing either our imagination or our reason can produce. It comes from outside. It’s something you receive.

And you can’t always put it into words. You can only tell stories about it.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Truth and Beauty,’ by Andrew Klavan

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He was the living truth. The religious had to kill him because they were religious. The leaders had to kill him because they were the leaders. The people had to kill him because they were the people. The law had to kill him because it was the law.

That was what it was like to be the truth in the world….

When Andrew Klavan released his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, I compared it to C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. But Surprised By Joy was a kind of re-working of a subject Lewis had handled allegorically in his earlier work, Pilgrim’s Regress, whose subtitle is: An Allegorical Apology for Reason and Romanticism. In his new (fairly short) book, The Truth and Beauty, Klavan addresses the same volatile topic.

As he tells the story, he was troubled by his inability to understand Christ’s teaching. He knew the gospel story. He understood the doctrines (as much as any of us understand them). But how do we follow Jesus’ teachings? Are we really expected to give everything we own to the poor? Not to resist an evil man? To pluck out an eye that leads us to sin? What is Jesus talking about?

His son suggested that perhaps he was trying to solve a problem instead of trying to get to know a Man. So he plunged into the gospels – taught himself Koiné Greek to read them in the original language. And what he began to understand – oddly – led him to the Romantic Poets of England.

The book casts a wide loop, but always returns to those Romantics – Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge on the bright side, and Byron and Shelley on the dark side. And among them, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in whose novel Frankenstein he finds a key to understanding much of the modern rebellion against nature – Victor Frankenstein, he hypothesizes, was not trying to play God. He was trying to eliminate the Female. Which makes him a harbinger of our times.

There is much to ponder in this book, and I can’t claim I understand it all. I need to read it again. But the answer to the problem of getting to know the mind of Christ, as Klavan sees it, is seeing how in all nature – not only the natural world around us but our own nature – the truth of Christ is revealed. The Trinity is everywhere, giving us glimpses behind the veil, calling out to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The life that Jesus lives is promised to us. The Romantics at their best glimpsed this, and some of them embraced it in the end.

There were things in this book that troubled me from a doctrinal point of view. I think any thoughtful Christian will have a similar experience. Because Klavan isn’t doing apologetics here. He’s peering into mysteries. He may be wrong at some points, but I’m not prepared to say so on one reading of the book. By and large, I think he’s on the right track.

Highly recommended for thoughtful Christians, especially those who love literature.