Introduction
A novel saved Abraham Kuyper. The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte Yonge possessed not just initial, but ongoing influence for Kuyper, who writes, “[T]hough not in value, [The Heir of Redclyffe] stands next to the Bible in its meaning for my life.”[1] Kuyper writes of a particular scene, “Oh, what my soul experienced at that moment I fully understood later. Yet, from that moment on I despised what I used to admire and I sought what I had dared to despise.”[2] It is a puzzle that God used a work of art to save Kuyper. Thankfully, Kuyper provides us with the puzzle’s solution in Pro Rege and Common Grace, two of his largest theological works.
By way of introduction, I consider two key Reformed convictions for Kuyper concerning art: specifically, the sovereignty of Christ over all things and God’s common grace. I then argue, first, one quality of art as revelation is its potential to enlighten; second, righteously inspired artistic artifacts, as well as a culture-wide artistic aggregate, can improve character; finally, art should be beautiful, given that art is the product of man’s search for God’s glory. In conclusion I answer the puzzle Kuyper’s conversion poses — God used a novel to spiritually transform the hard-hearted Kuyper — with the insights explored in this study.
Common Grace and Pro Rege contain a variety of rich conceptions of and roles for art woven throughout the breadth of their treatments. Given the limitations of space, this article focuses on revelation, character, and the connection between beauty and desire. However, these qualities of art are not arbitrary because together they answer the puzzle posed by Kuyper’s conversion.
Christ is King, Grace is Common
Kuyper believes it crucial to recognize Jesus as the omnipotent, redemptive, reconciling, and righteous King over everything. Thus, he is the king over art. Jesus is the explanation for art, the goal for art, the governor of art, and the quintessential artist. Similarly essential, the common grace doctrine provides Kuyper an explanation for the existence of quality pagan art in a world sick with God’s curse.
Kuyper envisions Jesus as responsible for art and beauty. Christ “bore” beauty in himself before creation.[3] From Christ’s glory, like a ray of light which, going through a prism, splinters into a thousand shades of color, arose a good, beautiful creation that is a reflection of the imprint of the “radiance of [Christ’s] divinity.”[4] Kuyper places Jesus at the “eternal central point” of the realm of beauty.[5] Further, because of Jesus, the sublime experience need not be fearful, shame-inducing, or incomprehensible, but through Christ’s redemptive work, the Christian can experience a “holy beauty” that directs us to love and worship God.[6] Jesus even provides a particular, special inspiration for the Christian artist.[7]
In the pattern of his life, Jesus provides an example for artists to emulate. He “puts natural beauty in its place” by reversing physical deformity; he celebrated beauty at the wedding at Cana and participated in the “joy of life;” he everywhere, like the storm on Galilee, restored a beauty interrupted by the curse—Kuyper describes Jesus’ relationships with people and in all his works as that of a “Master Artist.”[8]
Jesus is king because he is “Redeemer and Reconciler,” and in Christian art this redemption ought to be expressed.[9] Because Jesus reconciled the Christian to God, the Christian lives more fully in God’s image and thus, given that art is a capacity from that image, our art “takes higher flight.”[10] Jesus is the “Greatest Artist,” and only his children can create art in reconciled relationship with him.[11]
Art proceeding from common grace inhabits the realm of “everyday living,” though it can and should glorify God.[12] Kuyper’s vision for art is art democratized and expanded outside of the historically constricting dictates of the Christian church, “significant to all human life in broader society when flourishing in the domain of common grace.”[13] Without common grace, creation would be ugly, chaotic, and nightmarish. Common grace preserves beauty in both nature and in sinful man.[14] Also, God brings forth through common grace “the latent potential in creation to fruition.”[15] As grace, this favor of God is unmerited, and as common grace it is universal.[16]
Revelation
Art is revelation, and Christian art should aspire towards right revelation which enlightens. Principally important for the artist is his artistic eye, his ability to take a complexity in the experience of human life, or in nature, or even of a theory, and transpose an insight into this complexity or the complexity itself into art. Thus says Kuyper,
The artist has a trained eye, able to see what you do not see. He has a more fertile imagination and captures in the mirror of that imagination the things that escape your notice. He sees more; he sees with greater depth and greater accuracy; he sees things in relationship to each other. In addition, he is sensitive to pleasant impressions and is able to objectify those impressions in a way that nature does not provide, yet in a way that allows you, with your weaker and less developed eye, to enjoy similar impressions.[17]
This impression could be, in Kuyper’s example, as trivial as a mood of frivolity transposed through song which could inspire one to eat ice cream.[18] It would not be a sin to write this song, but Kuyper recognizes the potential of art is greater than encouraging culinary indulgence. The church and her best artists should aspire to convey the truths of the Bible, the transcendental truths of heaven: sorrow, regret, love, redemption. Kuyper does not think, however, that we should be restricted in subject-matter only to biblical themes and people.[19] God is present as much in day-to-day trivialities as in the miracles he wrought through Elijah or in the continued existence of mountain ranges. The sovereignty of God actually demands the artist communicate the workings of God in all things. Consequently, nearly everything is open to the artist as subject-matter for artistic creation.
Kuyper writes, “If art were a systematic embodiment of ideas, a kind of enclosure could be erected around it. But that is not what art is … [it] arises out of the sensory world of our imagination.”[20] Artistic revelation is accordingly, by its nature, impossible to imitate or copy with words. Art reveals through encounter. The artist does not need to establish a philosophy to successfully produce art which reveals. Nor must he be able to articulate with words what he incarnates in art. For Kuyper, art begins with sight, the artistic eye. Artistic creation begins with an artist’s awareness of beauty in nature and the “hidden [spiritual] world,” an awareness of beauty that through imagination is incarnated and objectified with the instrument of art, be it a chisel, brush, or whatever else.[21] This both grounds art and mystifies it.
Art is grounded by only ever existing through matter. On the material level, art can be analyzed, dissected, and spotlighted under the scientific gaze. Kuyper mystifies art by sourcing the movement of artistic creation both in a “spirit” moving the human person and in the essential relationship between man’s capacity for making art and beauty, a beauty sourced in the mystery of the infinite Godhead. Kuyper says “no unity in the revelation of art is conceivable, except by the art-inspiration of an Eternal Beautiful, which flows from the fountain of the Infinite.”[22] Art is physical, but it embodies the transcendent mystery of the beauty of God.
Kuyper posits the human mind as a key resource for the artist. The human mind has a special role as conduit or bridge between earth and heaven. The mind even now can reach with an “awareness and mental impression of the glory beyond all earthly beauty that awaits us;” it can “postulate something of that higher reality,” and then “disclose” these things in art.[23] In music, for example, “the player or singer translates what you yourself can barely utter, doing so with rich and melodic chords in a manner that liberates your soul.”[24] The phrase “translate what you yourself can barely utter” serves also to explain one function of what Kuyper understands in the artist’s role as “high priest.”[25] Though for Kuyper the artist as priest is mostly a figurative image, as it concerns the artist’s mediating truth through his artifact, the artist operates much like a priest of old making gods known through symbols.
The scientific analysis of any individual artistic artifact is limited in providing an explanation of what art means, what it intends to mean, or why it is valuable at all. Kuyper says it is vain to “dissect” something to get at its beauty.[26] Because beauty is grounded in God and good art is beautiful, art has a character that belongs to such experiences as giving a gift, falling in love, or passionate anger. Art, however, allows the expression of these inarticulate experiences to be transferred to the other, and it is the artist’s mental imagination following from his identity as God’s image-bearer that makes such a revelation possible.
Reason, however, cannot be absolutely separated from artistic creation or appreciation. Kuyper recognizes the role of “harmony, symmetry, [and] rhythm,” as rules-of-thumb for what causes art to be beautiful.[27] Intelligence is required to incorporate such elements into art. A building requires a straightedge, and mixing paints requires alchemical specificity. Reason, however, is secondary in art. The best jazz musicians have a thorough grasp of the mathematically rigorous music theory governing chord progressions, but in their improvisation they hardly articulate their sound in terms of theory. We can conclude written or spoken explanation of meaning is not superfluous because there is value, for instance, in explaining why three pitches of a major chord perfectly tuned sound discordant, thereby allowing the ensemble to lower the third interval. Still, an informative museum plaque does not captivate, nor does it gift life-changing experiences even if it ostensibly conveys the same propositional message as the art beside which it hangs.
Kuyper is concerned to explain and redress the potential for the “demonic” instead of the “divine” to sway art.[28] Avant-garde art is an example of this danger realized. An art scholar notes avant-garde sought “not to depict the world but rather to transform it.”[29] This is dangerous because the avant-garde artists will then read into reality their own vision of reality.[30] The avant-garde abuses the revelatory capability of art to communicate falsehood. To try to transform the world according to the artist’s whim is not acceptable to Kuyper, but neither is mere depiction of nature and things.[31] Mere depiction is an improper use of art. In agreement with Kuyper, H. R. Rookmaker observes imitation tends to eliminate values.[32]
A good artist always goes beyond nature, all the while being tutored by nature. The good artist’s imagination involves creativity bounded by reality as opposed to fantasy; fantasy is perverted creativity, because it discards nature as a guide. Absent a guide, anything becomes acceptable to the artist.[33] Fantasy-art wrought from the sinful depths of man’s heart is the key characterization of modern art today and the reason it is largely a phantasmagoric slush of line and color. Training the artistic eye to see and reveal the fruit of this sight runs counter to “self-expression.” The focus, as Kuyper would see it, should be not on expressing oneself, but rather on expressing truth. The composer Igor Stravinsky noted the tendency for self-expression is self-indulgence.[34] Kuyper, similarly, recognized a particular vice of the artist is vanity.[35]
Granted the danger of indulgent self-expression, Kuyper also recognizes it is through inner contemplation upon nature, one’s heart, and God that the best art is formed.[36] As previously mentioned, Kuyper characterizes the interests of art divided between opposing forces. This fallen, cursed world “attempts to thwart that higher thirst [for beauty] and to silence that nobler drive,” and the only solution is a “power — an ability — that enables [the artist] to bring their inner world to triumph over the external world.[37] This is possible for the artist when he takes elements, like color or shape, through his “real powers and abilities” to realize art that is “a world of his own” lifted up above this existing world and thus able to disclose and “realize something higher than this world offers to humankind.”[38] Only the best of artists can accomplish this remarkable disclosure by walking not the easy path of self-expression, but the difficult path of other-expression — expressing the truth of nature, human nature, and God — through the artist’s self. Orientation toward the other, rather than self-expression, best communicates otherwise incomprehensible or often ignored true states of affairs. The mood, imagination, and inspiration of an artist’s “inner world” is essential, but the self which is expressed must yield to truth, goodness, and beauty for revelation to enlighten.
Kuyper compares the artist to a prophet in addition to his characterization of the artist as priest.[39] Kuyper writes that art is “intended to be an instrument for making access for the Spirit of the Lord, for inspiring the ideals of holiness and dignity, and thereby for glorifying God the Creator in all artistic expression.”[40] The stock advice for aspiring fiction writers is to write what you know. The artist must encounter the good and true before revealing in the fullest manner the good and true. Since only the Christian can fully participate in the good and true, it is his unique privilege to craft art reflective of his full participation with Christ. The prophet does not so much give opinions as speak the truth of God. So too the artist-prophet’s craft should not timidly suggest or hint at reality, but confidently assert the Christian world-and-life view of whatever in particular is the object of the artist.
Revelation is intrinsic to the nature of art. Art is basically a human capacity, and one of man’s defining features his intentionality. We are always about something. Further, art derives its building blocks from a nature radiating with forms testifying God’s glory. Consequently, art can not but possess meaning. If it is good to reveal, this entails there is something to reveal and this something is good. Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square suppresses revelation, God, value and nature; it aspires to be pure negation, has been described as the artistic equivalent of Descartes “total doubt,”[41] and states “nothingness [is] the essence of art.”[42] The painting is a black square centered on a white canvas. Of his own work, Malevich says, “In the year 1913, [trying] to free art from the ballast of objectivity [from depicting nature as is], I took refuge in the square form.”[43] Malevich is in a particularly modern crisis. After rejecting God, he is forced to deny that art should or can reflect objective truth. After he rejects nature, it ceases to guide him. He retreats into abstract metaphysicals which become his new gods, and Malevich on his first exhibition of the painting placed it where normally the Russian Orthodox icon of Jesus rests, in the top corner of a room. Thus is validated Kuyper’s oft-stated claim that all non-Christian art tends towards idolatry.[44]
Kuyper’s stance is contrary to the approach of Malevich and his square. Kuyper urges art to be flush with meaning and not absent meaning. He wants art to aid in our enlightenment rather than our confusion. Malevich flees from truth and objectivity and disdains nature to be the guide to his imagination. The Black Square is consequently less than impressive. The painting does reveal something, however. It reveals the darkness of Malevich’s own pagan heart, his rebellion against God, and the darkness of all artistic endeavor absent Jesus. So would Kuyper say, at least, and he would go further: it signifies the demonic.[45] Malevich fits Kuyper’s description of the man intoxicated by art: “Art is their highest goal, the end that justifies all means.”[46] The human heart is desperately wicked. Lacking direction and ungrounded from objectivity, the modern artist is like a dirty sponge expunging its filth into a basin of water, a Malevich splattering black paint on a white canvas.
To communicate through art the nuanced complexities of all creation is the privilege and task of the artist, and to communicate the character of God and the ways God relates to creation is the privilege for the Christian.
Character
On Kuyper’s view, art can positively benefit the Christian and non-Christian character. Art forms character and demands of its artist, at minimum, character. Ascribing virtue or piety to the pagan, strictly speaking, would be wrong. The Dutch Calvinist agrees with the Heidelberg Catechism’s query: “But are we so corrupt that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined to all evil?”and its correspondinganswer: “Yes, unless we are regenerated by the Spirit of God.”[47] Kuyper writes of this often: paradise “once radiated in all its beauty but then was lost, and [a curse] came over humankind and nature because of sin.”[48] Kuyper deems it inaccurate to attribute true virtue or piety to the non-Christian. “Character” bypasses the theological difficulty of ascribing virtue or piety to the pagan, and Kuyper does use the term “character,”[49] and also “personality,”[50] which I understand to be synonymous with “character.” Character can be understood to consist of someone’s disposition from habits and beliefs.
Kuyper recognizes a higher law above art. The law to honor God “must govern all formal laws of beauty.”[51] Under this law, art can “enchant” and “enrich.”[52] Sadly, “art all too often undermines the moral life.”[53] Immoral entertainment is at particular fault. Commonly, the theater is full of “disgraceful” performances and “foul language,” and people have fun “only when amused by nonsense or when sensually stimulated by displays of immorality.”[54] Again, art often ends in idolatry.[55] To understand better morally right against morally wrong art and to gain a better grasp of what makes one artifact capable of inducing one to moral failure and another to moral success, we have to grasp Kuyper’s conception of the spirit, formal beauty, and inspirational beauty.
Kuyper understands a distinction between an “instrument and the inspiration playing the instrument,” between accordingly formal beauty and material beauty.[56] His term “material” is confusing because it implies physical material, so we might label it according to his intent, “inspirational” beauty. Formal beauty designates the objective features and elements of a work of art which are the “means” through which art is produced.[57]A Psalm and the secular French national anthem Marseillaise, he relates, possess equivalent formal beauty. Labeling the Marseillaise as unholy and a Biblical psalm as holy as it regards formal beauty is a category error; indeed, David as much as Voltaire used the same means. Only, “this formal beauty [of any given work of art] does not constitute real beauty.”[58] Formal beauty is not irrelevant, but neither is it the sole standard by which to critique art.
Sanctified inspiration must “guide” formal beauty to achieve real beauty.[59] For whatever moves people, “inspiration does not push that spirit aside but raises its power and brings it to a more beautiful expression.”[60] Kuyper means by spirit that which moves someone, as in, “the spirit of the age was decadence.” He gives a litany of examples: some “people might exhibit a satanic spirit, a sarcastic spirit, a worldly spirit, an indifferent spirit, a narcissistic spirit,” but others might exhibit “a spirit of empathy, a spirit of righteousness, a spirit of consecration.”[61]
Inspiration is imaginative desire and direction. Kuyper’s “inspiration” is like a trampoline for the urge to create. Inspiration launches the artist’s vision into formal beauty. Art is therefore neutral. Either a spirit of the “demonic” or a spirit of the “divine” might use art.[62] In the deepest sense, the Marseillaise is ugly compared to a psalm because the French revolutionary song’s inspirational beauty is (allegedly) misguided. In contrast, any given psalmist was inspired by the Spirit, the Spirit of God himself, but we also see each individual psalm working with grief, or praise, or justice, which are particular “spirits.”
Art incarnates the artist’s inspiration and motivating spirit, be it a spirit of a particular vice, virtue, or the emotional state of the artist. Kuyper describes art as a butter knife. The butter knife can be used for culinary creation or murder.[63] Likewise, just as art can be used by a “demonic” or “divine spirit,” so too art “can be used to lift one up into realms of holiness and to drag one’s spirit down to the base and sinful.”[64] This transportive feature of art is crucial if art is to form character, and the place of transportation is the result of a particular artist’s inspiration and motivational spirit.
A helpful example Kuyper gives to ground these abstractions is as follows. A Dutch non-artist has “resentment” in his heart because of “injustices committed against [his] fellow tribesman in South Africa,” and it is good if he “observes [his] anger at England’s tyranny [in South Africa] as portrayed by some artistic rendering.”[65] The essential question for Kuyper is whether or not the artist’s “heart is echoing what your heart wishes to express, and whether he has captured that.”[66] In this example, art provides help to an emotionally distressed Netherlander. Instead of violently rioting on the street, the individual upset with England instead finds solace in another’s similar expression of outrage at injustice incarnated in art.
The spirit-motivated, imaginative, inner world of the artist produces an artifact about English injustice, and the potential for the one who encounters the artifact is that the artifact might prevent character destroying actions or, positively, produce solidarity with the suffering in South Africa as well as empathy with the victimized. The artist allows access for the non-artist an experience of the artist because of the artist’s art, and if this artist’s experience is within the bounds of moral goodness the non-artist is, when in contact with the art, momentarily placed in a state, or we might say an encounter with a disposition, which is morally good. Exposure to art can transport the non-artist into a morally good experience and can consequently better the character of the non-artist.
The Netherlander example, reversed, demonstrates how art can injure character. An artist might be motivated by pure spite and hatred of the English instead of grief over English injustice. Kuyper understands this spite and hatred cannot but influence the creation of the artifact. The artifact, forged in the crucible of vice, will track the same process described above to likely injure a person’s character upon his encounter with the artifact.
In a different manner, art is able to form character through the “sense of art” that beautifies life.[67] As opposed to the previously considered potential of a particular artifact to change character, “the sense of art” broadly dispersed “can improve life by means of clothing and jewelry, homes and furnishings, and manner and style of living.”[68] Kuyper understands the beautiful accoutrement, living spaces, and public spaces in a particular community or culture to influence its people in “automatic ways … to adopt manners and forms of life … by which their own style, appearance, and behavior becomes more refined.”[69] A society characterized by freedom and strength in character thus maintains and increases its character by the independent sphere of beauty acting as a force of resistance to the seeming inevitability of cultural moral decay and disorder; indeed, Kuyper mentions in his own era this decay: “people have become far too busy and restless to be able to devote time and tranquility to giving outward expression to their deeper artistic sensitivities.”[70] He continues his critique, “Art retreats from public life and huddles in its own quarters.”[71] In contrast to art huddling in elitist circles, Kuyper envisions art transforming every aspect of a culture even to the mundanity of “homes and furnishings.”
Kuyper does not explain why an artistic aggregate in a civic society’s processes, spaces, and fashions forms character or why it “ennobles,” dignifies, and enriches human life.[72] I think there are at least two explanations Kuyper would support: 1) the sacredness of beauty discourages vice; 2) the connection between beauty and dignity.
Kuyper writes of the sacred that it is present in art “as often as the artistic world proffers an attempt and makes the effort to overcome the corruption of the world, even if it is only to recall the beauty of paradise.”[73] To merely produce artifacts echoing man’s universal realization that once things were perfect is for Kuyper a strategy to “overcome the [present] corruption of the world,” because where ugliness reigns, whether in the natural environment, the orphan status of an abused child, or a road littered with potholes, this perverted beauty commands the gaze of the individual and demands one yield to a nihilism that all things were always wrong and will remain so. The danger of tragedy and ugliness is that we too will acquiesce to the Edenic curse ending in death without hope. Beautiful art and a greater artistic aggregate dispel this myth of a curse with no savior by attesting to truth and goodness. Beauty, dispelling this myth, provides access to a hope and a promise all will be whole again, for “[art] contains a prophecy of immortality and of a rich future awaiting us.”[74] Why? Jesus Christ created beauty, and beauty directs us to him.[75] Therefore, I believe Kuyper would be comfortable with the claim that the artistic aggregate in recalling the beauty of paradise implicitly poses a series of existential questions about one’s own origin and purpose. It is this interrogation by beauty of the one in beauty’s midst that spurs character development.
We have seen Kuyper’s conviction that beauty in art might inspire dignity and holiness. Because art is dignified, it brings dignity to its practitioners and appreciators. The individual pursuing creation or appreciation of art develops one’s art, or taste and discernment of art, and thus his character necessarily improves. For Kuyper, “talent” and “capacity” are near synonyms to “art.”[76] The creator and appreciator of good art is like a sommelier. The sommelier relies on discipline to cultivate his talent, capacity, art, to distinguish the highly subtle differences amongst wine and along the way shun alcoholism.
Another way to consider the connection between dignity, art, and character is God’s intent for the human person from the start. Kuyper describes art as “a gift that can be wasted, abused, and spoiled, and yet one that always has its origins in the Creator of what is personal and unique in a human being.”[77] Creating good art fulfills God’s intention for the artistically talented human, and the man within God’s intention is dignified. As a way to exercise dominion over the earth, art creation dignifies the artist and his work. The artistic aggregate in a culture or community attests its inhabitants have been fulfilling at least one purpose of their natures.
There is also social pressure. The artistic aggregate, in forming the people’s tastes and standards, encourages the one in its midst to align himself with the standards of art. In the same way the novice National Football League player who seeks the skill of his peers dedicates himself to becoming as great as his peers, so too the artistic aggregate compels the people in its midst to seek their own excellence.
Discerning an artifact’s inspirational beauty, its motivating spirit, is necessary to judge the artifact’s moral rightness. The single artistic artifact can prevent negative action and inspire good action as well as increase empathy and solidarity. Beauty recalls Edenic paradise and promises redemption from Earth’s present curse. Because of the connection of beauty to the sacred and dignity, an artistic aggregate — the cumulative beauty in processes, spaces, and things within a culture — also builds the character of the person. Art can degrade and debase character. Aware of this danger, the Christian should diligently seek artistic creation free of sensuality or inspiration by a vicious spirit and characterized instead by righteousness and holiness.
Product of Desire
Kuyper’s entire aesthetic and theology hinges on beauty. While “beauty” and the “sublime” are central concepts in 18th-century aesthetics[78] enlightenment ideas also undermined their traditional content. Kuyper was writing about art precisely when the modern art movement was gaining traction.[79] Under the influence of the logical positivists, the concept of beauty no longer signified a real, genuine description and quality of something, but rather one’s own feelings about a thing.[80] C. S. Lewis renounces such a notion, insisting that “the man who says This is sublime cannot mean I have sublime feelings.”[81] But even as Lewis defends beauty in an objective sense as distinct from subjective feelings, a Kuyperian account of beauty shows that there is a deep connection between subjective desire and the beauty of art.
Kuyper explains the bedrock impulse and cause of all art is a yearning both for the “original beauty of paradise” and the “beauty that shines in glory, which pushes men and women to search for something higher and better than any created thing in this world can give.”[82] Kuyper understands the word “glory” to designate the highest degree of beauty and an unchanging attribute of God. God is immutable so his glory neither decreases nor increases.[83] Not so beauty. For Adam and Eve in the garden were called to “mobilize” themselves to “draw out its [the garden’s] latent powers, and thus to bring all created things to a higher harmony.”[84] From the start, Adam knew and thirsted for a higher beauty not present in that earthly paradise, “glory.”[85] The thirst for a beauty greater than present on earth is permanent to our condition.[86] Against the desire, the world and immorality fight to “thwart that higher thirst and to silence that nobler drive.”[87] Art is the product of desire. More specifically, we desire beauty, particularly beauty in the superlative degree which is the glory of God. Accordingly we produce art that depicts something greater than nature is able in our desire for the transcendent. As God is eminently beautiful so our art strives for beauty.
James Bratt criticizes Kuyper’s understanding of art as further solidifying the relationship between morality, art, beauty, and desire. Bratt claims “Kuyper was hopelessly logo-centric” and too curmudgeonly with respect to art. He was critical of beauty detached from the true or good, critical of a godless art culture, and critical of “raw” and “low” things on stage or in paint.[88] Bratt thinks, too, that Kuyper’s ideas on art “led him toward a very traditional aesthetic and a practical dead-end. Without comment or question he linked art to ‘beauty,’ instantly walling off a large range of potentially Christian, not to mention actual Modernist productions.”[89] Bratt disapproves of Kuyper’s distaste for “alternative aesthetics.”[90]
Kuyper would respond as follows. First, Kuyper would consider it weak to critique the moral limitations of art. Kuyper understands the limitations of art, just like freedom, are necessary for the best art and the best freedom. Art detached from the true and good, and weaponized by a secular elite to appeal to the baser nature of the masses by elevating the “raw” and “low,” would be supremely bad art; as noted, Kuyper understands art and beauty must develop like a plant towards the glory of God, and God’s holy standard precludes Christian art the moral leniency that comes with “autono[my].”[91]
Second, Bratt’s dismembering of beauty from art is short-sighted. Bratt believes Kuyper linked beauty and art without “comment or question,” but this is false. Granted, Bratt effectively communicates a correct, if incomplete, version of Kuyper’s aesthetic: beauty is a lesser glory expressed most fully in God, and thus art is a way to capture a “richer reality” and display this to improve and inspire humanity.[92] But Bratt misses the universality of desire. Every man has a desire he may or may not be aware of for a greater beauty ultimately only found in God. This desire moves man to utilize his particular art, capacity, to create. God gifted to us art for his glory, and beauty and art are linked because art is supremely man’s attempt to express, communicate, and understand his desire for the paragon of beauty, God.
Kuyper connects the human capacity to produce art with God creating the heavens and earth and declaring it all good.[93] If human art parallels God’s creation, we too should seek to create the beautiful like God created the beautiful universe: we must “imitate God in the six days of a creation.”[94] Just as “there is artistic beauty in the rushing of a brook, in the song of a lark, in the crack of thunder,” Kuyper draws the connection, “human art is only an echo, imitation, and reflection of the divine art that expresses itself in all creation.”[95] Kuyper states the nature of “religion is beautiful and seeks the beautiful.”[96] Clearly there is justification when Kuyper associates beauty with art.
Finally, contra Bratt’s characterization, beauty is not a thin but a thick notion for Kuyper. Bratt denigrates Calvinistic art in its search for “harmony and … balance.”[97] And yet, beckoning art towards harmony and balance is for Kuyper beckoning art towards a higher ideal contrary to the alternative to harmony and balance: discord and teetering non-proportionality, chaos, ugliness, the demonic spirit made manifest, and ultimately the curse and its perversity. A cursory glance at Kuyper could conclude he rejects any innovation or diversity in art, only respecting art in the “traditional aesthetic,” but this is inaccurate. Not only did Greece, the birthplace of the traditional aesthetic, fail to exhibit Christian distinctives, but Kuyper writes art “does not exist only to be copied continually in a fashion that is both monotone and uniform. Within the world of beauty … the richest diversity, a virtually infinite multiformity, comes to expression again and again with its own style and character.”[98] The caveat is art must not deviate from the law of morality, truth, goodness and, crucially, beauty.
Kuyper’s “thick” notion of beauty is clear in the distinction within beauty between the inspirational and the formal. Two examples capture the resilience, genius, and thickness of Kuyper’s beauty, as well as the place he gives to desire. Kuyper understands appearance is not sufficient for beauty. He believes a mother possesses “noble beauty” greater than the beauty she had on her wedding day.[99] Then, he also recognizes “Jesus’ being must have expressed itself most beautifully” with a spiritual beauty even while on the cross.[100] Both the mother in grief and Jesus in agony are, to use his terminology for art, “formally,” ugly; but “inspirationally,” they are exemplars of beauty — to capture Jesus’ sacrifice in art without capturing his spiritual beauty would be wrong.
Kuyper explains this best when he expounds Romans 1:20: “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood.” Kuyper keys in on the “divine nature,” and uses a number of terms, “impressed,” “irradiates,” “shines forth,” “expresses,” to convey that this divinity, which is the divinity of his perfection, that is God’s glory, is stamped in all creation.[101] This “shines forth” in both the physical and spiritual, the body, and soul — and not to the two realms on their own, but also when they unite as in the God-imaging human person.[102] Again, beauty is by degrees lesser glory, and thus Kuyper can say when “this penetration [of glory in creature] experiences opposition, then ugliness appears.”[103] Thus, a beautiful work of art is a striving to express the divinity of God, and this divine glory helps us understand Kuyper’s emphasis on the inspiration of the artist and art as much as his concern of the physical features of the art by sourcing both spiritual and physical beauty in the being of God.
Desire, impossible to satiate absent true relationship with God, will — absent God — find expression in degraded, “external” ways.[104] Man tragically ignores his desire for God, but desire for God without the church to define and refine this desire for many leads to debased pursuits. For example, heavy metal music, in its discordant, scream-centric cacophony, is a product of perverted desire. Appreciation of art is a good thing and a result of man’s universal desire for glory, but because of sin, pagan man’s quest for satiety becomes the engine powering Hollywood, streaming services, cheap thriller novels, and endless scrolling through Tik-Tok or Instagram. Only when these media offer content meeting Kuyper’s strictures would they be beneficially revelatory and character forming, but as Kuyper realized, the profit motive and low taste of the masses leave the content of popular entertainment lacking. Entertainment genuflects before vulgarity and sensuality, for which people acquire a taste. Amusement thus commonly “prostitutes art,” to use Kuyper’s evocative phrase.[105]
Delight is essentially related to desire. God created for God’s sake. He “delights” in this beautiful creation.[106] God desires to share this delight with us. We can share in this delight because we are people “in his image.”[107]A God-given signal to confirm right action, intention, or success in relationship is delight, because acting, believing, and relating rightly glorifies God. Similarly, “[w]hen it gives this delight, beauty has fulfilled its calling.”[108] Art is the product of desire for delight in God’s glory. Indeed, ultimately desire is meaningless if it does not end in its own fulfillment, which is delight, and the truest fulfillment is found through delighting in God. This is all to say there is a vulnerable chink in the armor of the culture of godlessness: no bad art or entertainment will ever give lasting or true delight and no secular distraction ever fulfills. Kuyperian art will delight through revealing the shadow of God’s divinity which is true beauty, and also goodness, but preeminently with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Conclusion
Bratt relates that The Heir of Redclyffe is not “high classic literature, but the bestselling British novel of 1853,” intended by the author as an “object lesson for the Anglican Tractarian movement.”[109] The two scenes in The Heir of Redclyffe pivotal for Kuyper’s conversion were the Anglican burial ritual of the selfless Sir Guy and the reaction of an incorrigibly arrogant and proud man to Guy’s death. At Sir Guy’s death, the proud character Phillip realizes how horrible he has been and adopts a penitent heart. Regarding Phillip’s epiphany of his evil, Kuyper writes that “each of his words of self-condemnation cut through my soul as a judgment on my own ambitions and character.”[110] Until then incorrigibly arrogant as well as unkind to his fiancée, Kuyper repents and loves again his fiancée. His life trajectory shifts because of this novel.
It is a puzzle that Abraham Kuyper was converted neither in church nor through reading the Bible; indeed, neither was he converted in private prayer nor after interacting with a Christian mentor or clergyman, but through a novel. Bratt explains the novel reminded Kuyper “of a childlike faith he had lost.”[111] This is true and important, but the novel as a mere reminder of past faith is not sufficient to explain Kuyper’s life-transformative event.
The novel as revelation exposed to young Kuyper his own “ambitions and character.” Kuyper’s recognition of his depravity was crucial for his change, and the novel gave him this recognition. As we recalled, often artistic revelation is inarticulate. Kuyper writes he “only understood later” what transpired as a result of the novel.[112] Yonge saw, with her artist’s eye trained in the Christian truth, how to craft a fictional story of characters accurate to life and present the complexities of death, goodness, and evil, and it was her ability to translate insights of human nature and transcendent truth with skilled story-telling that allowed her novel the correct synthesis of formal and inspirational beauty.The novel enlightened Kuyper and demonstrated to him the truth of his evil human nature. As the novel did, so too might a painting, a song, or a sculpture. Art will not always end in someone’s salvation, but always the potential for good art is the enlightenment of those who encounter it.
As regards character-formation, just like art gave the Netherlander solace, empathy, and solidarity with those oppressed by England, so too Kuyper found solace — and, in his case, salvation — after empathizing with Phillip. However, had the novel not been beautiful, and had it not arisen from Yonge’s firm religious belief and stated goal to advocate for the Anglican Tractarian movement, then it would have failed to effectively move Kuyper. The idiot of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot famously declared, “Beauty will save the world.”[113] Kuyper, no idiot, helps us to understand why. Beautiful, God-honoring, well-crafted art can form characters and enlighten those it encounters—and hopefully, as he did with young Kuyper, God will use art to present powerfully Jesus Christ. For Jesus, who gave form and content to beauty, and who is in a real sense beauty personified, truly will save the world.
Logan Pitsenberger ’23
Logan is majoring in Philosophy and Christian Theology and minoring in Classics and Creative Writing. He is from Holland, Michigan. This research paper was written as part of the Shaftesbury Fellowship, of the Center for Religion Culture and Democracy Thinktank.
[1] Abraham Kuyper, “Confidentially,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 51.
[2] Kuyper, “Confidentially,” 54.
[3] Abraham Kuyper, Pro Rege: Living under Christ’s Kingship, 3 vols. (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2016-2019), 2:438.
[4] Kuyper, Pro Rege,2:438.
[5] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:438.
[6] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:457
[7] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:457.
[8] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:444.
[9] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:449.
[10] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:449.
[11] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:449.
[12] Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World, 3 vols. (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2015-2020), 3:579.
[13] Kuyper, Common Grace 3:580.
[14] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:591.
[15] Jeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (London: T&T Clark, 1991), 88.
[16] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 144.
[17] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:610.
[18] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:618.
[19] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:621.
[20] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:622.
[21] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:609.
[22] Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 151
[23] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:435.
[24] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:612.
[25] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:623.
[26] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:413.
[27] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:410.
[28] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:430
[29] Boris Groys, Logic of the Collection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021), 114.
[30] H. R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), 80.
[31] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:597.
[32] Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, 79.
[33] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:597.
[34] George Harne and Margarita Mooney Suarez, “Everyday Glory: Practical Living and the Human Desire for Glory,” in The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education, ed. Margarita Mooney Suarez (Providence: Cluny, 2022), 34.
[35] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:423.
[36] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:446.
[37] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:422.
[38] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:422.
[39] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:619.
[40] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:619.
[41] Groys, Logic of the Collection,166.
[42] Groys, Logic of the Collection, 109.
[43] Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1959), 68.
[44] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:574; Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:424.
[45] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:431.
[46] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:619.
[47] Heidelberg Catechism, 450th anniversary ed. (The Reformed Church in the United States: 2013), 24, Q&A 8.
[48] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:420.
[49] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:617.
[50] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:616.
[51] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:466.
[52] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:615.
[53] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:615.
[54] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:615.
[55] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:424.
[56] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:430.
[57] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:430.
[58] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:430.
[59] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:430.
[60] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:430.
[61] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:619-620.
[62] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:430.
[63] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:430.
[64] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:430.
[65] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:612.
[66] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:612.
[67] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:605.
[68] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:604.
[69] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:605.
[70] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:605.
[71] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:605.
[72] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:605.
[73] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:423
[74] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:422.
[75] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:437.
[76] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:623.
[77] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:384.
[78] Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court Publishing, 2003), 7.
[79] Hendrik Roelof Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), 62.
[80] Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 7-8.
[81] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Harper Collins, 2001), 3.
[82] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:422.
[83] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:417.
[84] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:417.
[85] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:417.
[86] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:418.
[87] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:422.
[88] James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 243.
[89] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 242.
[90] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 243.
[91] Kuyper, Common Grace, 617.
[92] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 243.
[93] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:473.
[94] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:623.
[95] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:388-389.
[96] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:613.
[97] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 243.
[98] Kuyper, Common Grace, 3:607.
[99] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:443.
[100] Kuyper, Pro Rege, 2:444.
[101] Abraham Kuyper, Calvinism and Art, Christian Thought. Lectures and papers on philosophy, Christian evidence, biblical elucidation. Ninth series. February 1892, pp. [259]–282 (1); June 1892, pp. 447–459 (2), 265
[102] Kuyper, Calvinism and Art, 265
[103] Kuyper, Calvinism and Art, 265
[104] Kuyper, Pro Rege 2:422.
[105] Kuyper, Pro Rege 2:422
[106] Kuyper, Pro Rege 2:405.
[107] Kuyper, Pro Rege 2:406.
[108] Kuyper, Pro Rege 2:405.
[109] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 38.
[110] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 39.
[111] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 40.
[112] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 39.
[113] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Ignat Avsey (Richmond: Alma Classics Limited, 2014), 399.