Thinking About the
Arts
Michael Goheen
Erin Goheen
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
(1699-1779): Kitchen Maid
Jan Vermeer (16321675): Milkmaid
Explore Four Areas
• What is the source of the artistic
impulse?
• What is ‘art’?
• What is the role of the arts in God’s
world?
• Battle for the arts
1. Source of Artistic
Impulse
• Grounded in the creative and
imaginative impulse that is part of
image of God
As image-bearer of God, man
possesses the possibility both to
create something beautiful, and to
delight in it’ (Abraham Kuyper).
People were created by God as
aesthetic creatures possessed of a
capacity for beauty, craving the
expression of their experiences and
insights (Leland Ryken).
How then can [humanity] be said to
resemble God? Is it his immortal soul, his
rationality, his self-consciousness, his free
will, or what, that gives him a claim to this
rather startling distinction? A case may be
argued for all these elements in the
complex nature of man. But had the author
of Genesis anything particular in mind? . . .
The characteristic common to God and man
is apparently that: the desire and ability
to make things (Dorothy Sayers).
1. Source of Artistic
Impulse
• Grounded in the creative and
imaginative impulse that is part of
image of God
• Grounded in the task God has given
to be good stewards and develop our
and world’s potential
2. What is art?
Create a world in which:
• Human experience or world is presented
for consideration (see)
‘My task . . . is, by the power of the written word to make
you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all to make you
see.’ (Joseph Conrad)
‘The function of the arts is to heighten our awareness and
perception of life by making us vicariously live in it.’ (Leland
Ryken)
2. What is art?
Create a world in which:
• Human experience or world is
presented for consideration (see)
• Human experience or world is
simplified
• Story or painting is a simplified world in
which all the irrelevant details are
removed; focus on subject to see with
heightened clarity.
• ‘The world of the literary imagination is
a highly organized version of the real
world. It is a world in which images,
characters, and story patterns are
presented stripped of distracting
complexities’ (Ryken).
‘We all know that Art is not truth. Art
is the lie that makes us realize the
truth.’ (Picasso)
‘The imagination . . . plays the game of
make-believe. It simplifies and
heightens reality. . . . The artistic
imagination is a window to reality.’
(Leland Ryken)
2. What is art?
Create a world in which:
• Human experience or world is
presented for consideration (see)
• Human experience or world is
simplified
• Human experience or world is
interpreted (see as)
‘To tell a story is to create a world,
adopt an attitude, suggest a
behaviour.’ (John Shea)
‘All great artists have a theme, an idea
of life profoundly felt and founded in
some personal and compelling
experience. . . . A novelist, therefore,
can give only . . . truth with an angle.
(Joyce Cary)
‘Artists aim to make the audience
share their vision—to see what they
see, feel what they feel, and
interpret life as they do.’ (Ryken)
‘The artists . . . can transmute . . .
reality into the order of significant
form only in accordance with what
are his most fundamental beliefs
about what is radically significant in
life.’ (Nathan Scott)
‘Literary reality is a carefully framed
and controlled kind of actuality, with
every element displaying the artist’s
own beliefs, his own values. His
choice of subject matter and his
treatment of it are evidences of his
attitudes.’ (Keith McKean)
2. What is art?
Create a world:
• Human experience or world is presented
for consideration (see)
• Human experience or world is simplified
• Human experience or world is interpreted
(see as)
• Shaped by artistic techniques
‘Art takes real life as its subject, but the
imagination of the artist transforms
those materials in keeping with the
conventions of art.’
‘Art does not try to give a photographic
copy of life; it rearranges the materials
of life in order to give us a heightened
perception of its qualities. Art is life at
the remove of imaginative form.’
‘Method of art is to incarnate meaning in
concrete form, signs, images, symbols.
We enter the world of our imaginations.’
-Ryken
3. What is the role of
arts in God’s world?
• Delight, enjoyment, entertainment
‘That is how it is with poetry: created and
developed to give joy to human hearts.’
(Horace)
‘The arts tell us a lot about human
experience, but they also exist to be
delightful in themselves.’ (Ryken)
• ‘Art needs no justification.’
(Rookmaker)
• As God’s image created to delight in
and enjoy beauty, harmony, etc.
‘A poem begins in delight and ends in
wisdom. . . . It begins in delight . . .
and ends in a clarification of life.’
(Robert Frost)
3. What is the role of
arts in God’s world?
• Delight, enjoyment, entertainment
• Deepens and broadens an
understanding of ourselves, world,
others
Deepens insight
‘The function of the arts is to heighten
our awareness and perception of life
by making us vicariously live in it.’
(Ryken)
‘The grand power of poetry [also other arts]
is its power of so dealing with things as to
awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and
intimate sense of them, and of our
relations with them. When this sense is
awakened in us, . . . we feel ourselves to be
in contact with the essential nature of
those objects . . . (Matthew Arnold).
• Imagination enables us to understand
world in way reason does not!
‘The world of literature is a world where
there is no reality except that of the
imagination. . . . The constructs of the
imagination tell us things about human
life that we don’t get in any other way.’
(Northrop Frye)
Also broadens insight
‘When we are at play, or looking at a
painting or a statue, or reading a
story, the imaginary work must have
such an effect on us that it enlarges
our own sense of reality.’ (Madelein
L’Engle)
‘We seek an enlargement of our being.
We want to be more than ourselves. Each
of us by nature sees the whole world
from one point of view with a perspective
and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. . .
We want to see with other eyes, to
imagine with other imaginations, to feel
with other hearts, as well as with our
own. . . . We demand windows. . . . This, so
far as I can see, is the specific value or
good of literature. . . .; it admits us to
experiences other than our own. (C.S.
Lewis)
3. What is the role of
arts in God’s world?
• Delight, enjoyment, entertainment
• Deepens and broadens an
understanding of ourselves, world,
others
• Expression of creative impulse
• Nourishes the imagination
Role of the Artist
'To become an artist means that you
become a professional imaginator in order
to help your handicapped, unimaginative
neighbour. Our artistic profession is meant
to give voice, eyes, ears and tactile sense
to those who are underdeveloped toward
such rich nuances of meaning in God's
creation‘ (Cal Seerveld).
We will live out of our imaginations . . . so
they had better be nourished in a healthy
way!
‘. . . we are far more image-making and
image-using creatures than we usually
think ourselves to be. . . We are guided by
images in our minds . . . The human is a
being who grasps and shapes reality . . .
with the aid of great images, metaphors,
and analogies.’ (H. Richard Niebuhr)
‘Pre-conceptual sensing’ ‘non-verbal cognition’
‘the right side of the brain’
4. Battle for Imagination
and Arts
‘Our leisure, even our play, is a
matter of serious concern. There is
no neutral ground in the universe;
every square inch, every split second,
is claimed by God and counterclaimed
by Satan. . . . It is a serious matter
to choose wholesome recreations.’
(C.S. Lewis)
‘One of the great tragedies of our day is
that people do not know how to use their
leisure time in enriching ways.’ (Ryken)
Much leisure time: boredom, search for
distraction, fear of spending time by
oneself, sensuality, escape into comedy,
violence, and the appeal of horror. (Paul
Elmen)