Looking Back: Church and Art Should Have The Same Voice

From October 1953

Church and Art Should Have The Same Voice

Is It Coming Again in Scotland?

By George Bruce, Scots poet and critic.

“When the community is a single whole the preacher and the artist are more easily understood – and they understand each other.”

The Church cannot do without Art. A meeting place is required, windows for light, music for praise, words for communion – and the sum of these arts of architecture, music, literature, speech, drama to be devoted to one end: to glorify God.

Yet the creative intelligence has been divorced from the Church for more than a hundred years; for that matter likewise from society from the time of the Industrial Revolution to the present. The artist has been regarded as a ‘Bohemian’, a person with a difference – certainly without a function in the state. The measure of responsibility for this misfortune cannot be assessed here. We are simply concerned with the effect.

The result of the ‘divorce’ is to be seen – at its worst – towards the end of the last century in a hymnology, a church architecture, a stained glass so bad that it had better never been. What was lacking in quality was made up for in quantity -  a quantity that was paralleled in the secular world by the multitude of new British machine-made knick-knacks which at least assisted in bringing prosperity to the United Kingdom, if not wisdom. It is significant that the artist lost his employment when quality gave way to quantity, when, in fact, society was subtly changing from being an organism to an organisation, when we came to value things rather than persons; when film stars were wondered at, not philosophers, when magnificence was preferred to character.

A Community Held Together

Now, at certain times artist, Church and people have been so closely related that is it difficult indeed to separate them. In the Elizabethan age preacher and artist understood each other. Their speech was the speech of the people, heightened or modified certainly for the purposes of their art and their proclamation, but never a different speech, never an alien speech difficult to be understood. The community was held together in a common life. And the very speech of the people, sharp, racy, witty, was itself an art, an art which gave us Shakespeare, at the Elizabethan court, in theological debate, and raised on occasion to the plane of witty drama and poetry.

In a word, there was a living community in which all this varied life shared. The ethics of the Church were the ethics of Elizabethan life. And the speech of the people entered the sermons of the preachers and the New Translation.

Are there Signs?

What of today? Undoubtedly there has been a revival of the arts, born from the very realisation that our time of wavering faith and disintegration was an unlikely time for revival; born of a new humility. Twenty years ago, TS Eliot in his criticism showed the way when he wrote:

“There is accordingly something outside of the artist to which he owes allegiance, a devotion to which he must surrender and sacrifice in order to achieve his unique position.”  And his poem, The Waste Land, generally recognised as the beginning of modern poetry, is itself a religious judgement of modern Europe. Since then, Mr Eliot has become a member of the Church of England and his later works relate him more positively to the Faith. His play Murder In The Cathedral is not merely a play about religion; it is a religious play. So once again, the Church and Art may link.

Has Scotland real community?

What is the position in Scotland? A vigorous and characteristic activity in all the arts has developed over the past thirty years. There has been remarkable work in stained glass; Strachan’s and others is intentionally celebrated. In sculpture Scotland has again artists whose work reveals distinctive Scottish character. In writing, particularly in poetry,  we once again speak as Scotsmen. More than twenty years ago, Hugh M’Diarmid realised again the vigorous potential of the Scots tongue and initiated a literary activity which continues to-day. A native drama which has drawn nourishment from the wit of the French theatre has come into being. In music the composer Francis George Scott bases his contemporary art songs on the idiom of Scottish folk song. (It must be admitted that equally characteristic of the movement is much misdirected and wasted effort; and this is due in the most part, to our divided, irreligious society).

Many of our better writers to-day are outside the Kirk. This is not to say they are without spiritual perception. On the contrary, I believe our lives will be enriched by association with their critical and creative activity. At least they teach us by their rejection of sentimentality – always an important lesson for the Church to learn – and by their passion to discover truth. And they point us, even while showing up our divided society, to the single organic community which ought to be, and in which Church and people and artist would speak and be understood in the one voice.

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