Notions and practices of creativity have been central to the culture that has developed in the West in the period since the late eighteenth century. Often this has involved invoking, reflecting, or applying aspects of Christian beliefs about divine creativity – as when Coleridge spoke of imagination as an echo in the finite mind of the great ‘I AM’. For Coleridge, this ‘echo’ reverberates in all forms of human consciousness: perceiving anything at all involves a kind of secondary act of creation, but Coleridge would see the supreme exemplification of this creative capacity in the figure of the ‘artist’ or ‘poet’, so that the artist becomes a blueprint for what we all can or could or perhaps even should be or become.
This is a view of the nature of art and artistic activity that is relatively novel and relatively local. Up until the threshold of modernity, those persons we call ‘artists’ were largely to be regarded as artisans or craftsmen.
As Larry Shiner has pointed out in this study The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, it is perhaps a nice irony that whereas the Greeks have been regarded from the Renaissance onwards as exemplifying the ‘artistic genius of mankind’, the Greeks themselves ‘had no word for art’ in our modern sense. As Shiner comments: ‘What is strikingly absent in the ancient Greek view of the artisan/artist is our modern emphasis on imagination, originality, and autonomy. In a general way, imagination and autonomy were appreciated as part of the craftsmanship of commissioned production for a purpose, but not in their emphatic modern sense.
Although the achievements of Greek naturalism in painting and sculpture of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. were much admired, for the most part painters and sculptors were still viewed as manual workers, and Plutarch said that no talented young aristocrat upon seeing and admiring the famous Zeus of Phidias would want to be Phidias’.
The Romantic hyping of artistic activity could, of course, lead to conflict with older theological models, as artists-creators came to challenge the prerogatives of God-the-Creator. Nietzsche, having pronounced the death of God and called upon human beings to a life of endless self-overcoming, also described this life as essentially artistic – a model he was as happy to apply to ethics and politics as to painting, writing, and making music. The artist was the supreme self-inventor who, having become free of the guilt-consciousness instilled by Christianity’s preachers of death, became the inventor of his own values, his own world, his own life.
This confrontation still reverberates in contemporary discussions of the relationship between art and religion, as evidenced by a recent collection of essays by the critic Peter Conrad, entitled Creation: Artists, Gods, and Origins.
According to the fly-leaf, Conrad ‘describes the long illness and eventual demise of the Christian God, and shows how artists and scientists were ready and eager to take over a creative role that was once a heavenly prerogative.’ Conrad’s message is, on the whole, one of art supplanting religion or (as was the case with Nietzsche) returning behind Christianity to the mythology of the ancient world. He begins his story with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and affirms the ‘Promethean’ implications of the story and Conrad also quotes Hazlitt’s comment on Shelley’s poetic ambition to be ‘the maker of his own poetry – out of nothing’. But if one is looking to the religious tradition for insights to illuminate creativity, is Genesis 1 the best place to begin?
I want to suggest that, if we’re going to get the most out of what the Christian tradition has to offer, then there is maybe more to be gained from looking at issues of creativity in the light of central New Testament teachings on redemption in Christ.
There is a rather well-known thirteenth century illuminated picture of God creating the world that is also reproduced in Conrad’s book. ‘God’ is recognisable as Jesus, equipped with compasses that are poised to divide the sublunary sphere into its various constituent parts.
This identification hinges on Jesus being ‘the Word’ that was in the beginning with God and in and by which God worked the acts of creation (‘God said ...’ etc.). But the picture also reflects a Christian approach to what is generally called ‘the Old Testament’ that is usually referred to as ‘typological interpretation’. According to this method of interpretation, Christ was the essential subject of each and every Old Testament text, whether this was the kingship of David, the crossing of the Red Sea, the drunkenness of Noah or the Creation itself. Now this could lead to merely fantastical interpretations, and the vast majority of them have now been discontinued as material for doctrinal reflection and development.
However, the strategy of interpreting the Old Testament in the light of the New had clear merits, and we can see something of this in the case of Creation. For instead of forcing Christians to confuse the religious meaning of creation with cosmological speculations, it read the Old Testament text in the light of the believer’s actual experience of Christ’s birth, death, resurrection and ascension. This meant that what Christians knew of the Our models for what it is to be a good human being are vitiated by past failures of freedom.
From Creation to Re-creation George Pattison argues that Christ’s Passion is a better model for human creativity than the six days of creation in Genesis 1. ‘new creation’ in Christ provided an interpretative key to the meaning of creation and not vice versa. But if this is the starting-point for Christian reflection on creation, what happens to the ‘out-of-nothing’ that theologians have always insisted on as defining divine creativity and that, as we have seen, is also taken up into the Romantic view of human creativity?
Now it is obvious that the passion narrative presupposes a world and a history within which and within which alone it makes sense. Precisely for this reason, the Church decided rather early on that its proclamation of salvation in Christ needed to be embedded in the specific context provided by the Old Testament scriptures. Israel, along with its history, its land, its cities, and its countryside, even its Mediterranean agriculture – the vine, the olive, and sheep-herding – thus entered into the very fabric of the Christian scheme of salvation. As Christianity moved into other cultural environments, that could prove problematic. Hegel would ask, rhetorically, ‘Is Judah, then, the Teuton’s Fatherland?’, and would recontextualise the Christ-event in the crisis of GrecoRoman civilisation. But the Christian message always requires some kind of context and therefore the ‘new creation’ in Christ cannot be ‘out of nothing’ in any literal cosmological sense. For it is always new creation or re-creation. And yet it is also, in a sense, ‘out of nothing’. How is this? The key to answering this question, I suggest, is to look at aspects of the Christian doctrine of the Fall.
From early on, Christian theology drew on Platonism to help articulate its teachings and that included a certain understanding of Being and nothingness. In its absolutely simplest outline, this meant a correlation to the point of identification between God and Being and a representation of creation as the communication of Being to all possible beings. However, apart from God Himself, all other beings were marked by some deficiency in being – having an admixture of non-being, we may say – and were thus unable simply to be themselves by themselves or to sustain their own being without depending on others. The greater the admixture of nonbeing, the less beings are, until the point is reached at which existence simply ceases and there is pure flux such that nothing comes into or passes out of being. The fact that creatures had been made ‘out of nothing’ thus suggested to Augustine (for one) a kind of inevitability about their falling away from God, back into the nonexistence out of which they were called into being. This thought is, of course, then taken up into what would be called the theory of evil as privation, that the nature of evil itself is not something positive but negative, namely, the lack of that measure of being appropriate to the kind of being that, e.g., human beings are.
Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work The Concept of Anxiety offered the modern world an important revision of Augustinian teaching about the Fall. Via Heidegger and Sartre, it would become a key text of twentieth century philosophy, as well as of modern theology.
Although Kierkegaard himself was moulded by the Augustinianism of his Lutheran background, his ideas are, in many respects, profoundly anti-Augustinian. He not only dismisses the mythical dimensions of the Fall story, he insists that the loss of freedom can only ever be understood as a free act. Therefore, whilst a certain quantitative predisposition to sin might accumulate from generation to generation, that quantitative accumulation can never necessitate that you or I or our neighbour do actually ‘fall’.
Yet at one point Kierkegaard sees a connection between the Fall and nothingness. Kierkegaard describes the situation of the soul before the Fall as that of ‘dreaming innocence’, a state prior to the arising of egoconsciousness and of a world upon which the ego acts.
Beyond its own dream world the future self has ‘nothing’. But, Kierkegaard asks, ‘what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety.
Dreamily, the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is nothing, and innocence always sees this nothing outside itself’. In other words, every human life – as Heidegger would later say – is ‘thrown’ towards possibilities it does not yet understand and cannot yet realise. Thus the self can become what it is only by creating itself out of nothing. But here’s the rub: nothing ‘begets anxiety’. Kierkegaard is far from attributing a causal link between ‘nothing’ and the Fall, since it is always possible that we do not swoon or succumb to vertigo in the face of nothing, but really do ‘become who we are’. Yet the sheer infinity of the possibilities towards which we are thrown is deeply unsettling to our felt need to be something and someone rather than nothing and no-one, even if the ‘something’ is a second-rate social identity offered at the bargain price of a more or less conscious conformism.
Soren Kierkegaard But the situation is even more unsettling if we take into account that the world into which we are thrown is marked by a quantitative accumulation of ‘sin’, i.e., a socially embodied history of human beings not becoming who we have it in us to become, a history – or histories – of and a ready-made rationale for not being otherwise than we are expected to be. Our models for what it is to be a good human being are from the very start vitiated by past failures of freedom. This does not predetermine us to fall, but it certainly makes the task of living authentically more daunting. In situations of trans-generational family dysfunctionality, communal conflict, and war, nothingness becomes a weight under which human beings can scarcely move; the void opens beneath us at every footstep.
There might be many examples from one or other art that we could draw on to illustrate this, but the one that perhaps encapsulates the human, philosophical, and artistic issues is Neil Jordan’s 1982 movie, Angel, a classic story of revenge, set in Northern Ireland during the recent troubles. The central character, Danny (nicknamed ‘the Stan Getz of South Armagh’), is a showband sax player who witnesses the murder of the band’s manager by a gang of racketeers after a gig at a local dance hall. He tracks the gang down and sets out to kill them, one by one. As the story progresses, the theme of nothingness comes more and more to the fore.
At one point Danny is taken by the police to the morgue and confronted with the dead body of one of his victims.
The senior detective, Bloom, asks him, ‘What do you know, Danny?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘I know nothing too. You’ve got to watch nothing. It can take hold of you. Be careful for those hands, Danny. You need them, don’t you?’ ‘I’m a musician.’ ‘If music be the food of love... how does it go?’ ‘Play on.’ ‘You know, you can go places, Danny, where I couldn’t. Do you understand me? It’s a kind of poetic license.’ There is much to comment on in this exchange, but the main implication seems to be that the cycle of revenge (which really is born of ‘nothing’, because it is devoid of reason and purpose) can never entirely be settled by the objective methods of law and punishment.
Only the artist, only the one with the ‘poetic license’ can find his way to the heart of darkness. But, as the film shows, Danny (the artist) too needs redemption, he too is trapped in the nothing. One night, shortly after the encounter with Bloom, his girlfriend – aware that something is going on that Danny is not telling her about – turns away from him as he tries to kiss her. ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘Why not?’ ‘You have to tell me first.’ ‘It’s nothing.’ ‘You’re lying.’ ‘It’s like a nothing you can feel. And it gets worse.’ It gets a lot worse before, the cycle of killing over, Danny finds an anguished redemption in the ruins of the burnt-out dance hall where it all began. Over the charred ruins Danny’s signature rendition of the Londonderry Air, raw and poignant, plays out the end credits.
The cycle of revenge perfectly epitomises what Kierkegaard described as the ‘quantitative accumulation’ of sin: it is a situation in which the individual seems helpless, a ‘wheel of fire’ to which we are bound, a nothing we can feel, and into which all the things we could have been sink without trace. It is at the heart of the questions that all great tragedy proposes: can we be redeemed from the burnt-out dance-halls that strew our collective and individual pasts? Can we find an art capable of relieving the monotony of violence, the binary mathematics of action and re-action, black-andwhite, good-and-evil, and liberating us into a polychrome life-world of genuine richness and depth? Is it the case that ‘nothing comes of nothing’ (Lear) or can there be re-creation out of the nothing of history?
Which brings us back to the cross. The new creation to which Christian theology bears witness is not a new creation out of an absolute cosmic or metaphysical nothing. It is the new creation of a world and a history degraded and diminished by suffering, violence, and every possible manifestation of sin and, as such, is also healing, restorative, regenerative, re-creational, reversing the quantitative accumulation of nothingness that has so long overwhelmed our individual and collective aspirations for something better.
Putting theology to one side, if we now understand this in purely human terms it seems to me to address the potential hubris of the high Romantic view of creativity modelled on Genesis 1. As an example of this view, Conrad describes the trailer for Citizen Kane, which deliberately parodies Genesis 1, with its narrator (Welles himself) playing the part of ‘an all-seeing autocrat who prefers to remain unseen, a creator who pervades his creation and yet is teasingly absent from it.
But if it is unsatisfactory for God to be an invisible autocrat who answers to no-one, it is surely even more unsatisfactory when human beings take on such a role.
Such artist-creators are not only virtually super-human (as Nietzsche desired and predicted) but also at risk of becoming in-human (as Thomas Mann suggested in his Doktor Faustus). The artist-creator may find his exemplars and apologists in Leonardo and Michelangelo, in Shakespeare’s Prospero, in the poetic creed of a Shelley, the prophecies of Nietzsche, and may seem almost to be realised in such extraordinarily genial figures as Welles himself or, perhaps most god-like of all twentieth century artists, Picasso. Yet such figures actually represent only a small part of human beings’ artistic creativity, and are they, in the event, what we most value? Is there not, after all, a certain inhumanity in Leonardo compared with his less masterful but ultimately more gracious contemporary Botticelli, and much as we admire Michelangelo’s titanic David, does it move us to the same depths as his own flawed and death-haunted Pietà? Does Prospero offer more insight into the human condition than Shakespeare’s own Poor Tom or our times’ Primo Levi? Is mastery greater than Only the artist, only the one with the ‘poetic license’ can find his way to the heart of darkness. healing or power than suffering? Is it greater to save a life that has become habituated to self-destructive tendencies or to forget about such complications and invent a new world in which such awkward creatures don’t exist? And note the maleness of this ‘Creator’ model!
There is, of course, much more to be said about each of these examples, for and against, but I offer them merely as indicative of how thinking about creativity in the light of the passion narrative might engage ideas of creativity as they are seen in some characteristic figures of modern art. Moreover, on this model there is no intrinsic conflict between divine and human creativity: working to comfort, heal, restore and give hope to suffering human beings fallen or always on the edge of falling into nothingness invites collaboration rather than rivalry.
I would like to conclude by exploring this idea of divine/ human collaboration a little bit further, and doing so in the light of some admittedly rather speculative remarks of the great Russian religious philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev. In his 1908 work The Meaning of Creativity, Berdyaev directly contests the view that the designation of God as ‘Creator’ obstructs human beings’ discovery, exploration and practice of their own creative possibilities. On the contrary, precisely because God is Creator and human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, the creativity of human beings must be a basic datum of Christian anthropology. Rather than the zero sum game played out in debates between Nietzschean Romantics and Christian dogmatists it is not the case that the more creativity and freedom there is on the one side, the less there must be on the other. Instead, the greater the creativity and freedom on one side, the more there will be on the other. The cycle of reciprocity is expansive, and each ‘side’ bears the interests of the other. In living creatively, I am assisting in the fulfilment of the divine will for creation: in affirming the creativity of God, I am affirming the creative potential of humanity.
In a further step, Berdyaev suggests that our own human experiences of creativity and freedom therefore offer a genuine analogy into what divine creativity itself means. With some help from the mystical tradition (Boehme and Eckhart) Berdyaev depicts God as engaged in a process of self-creation: that there is a kind of nothingness or abyss within the divine life, and that God ‘becomes’ Creator by self-creation out of this nothing.
Furthermore, this process of divine self-creation is not conceived by Berdyaev as something occurring temporally ‘before’ the world, but as being enacted in and through the creative transformation of suffering and the creative contestation of the history of nothingness that is exemplified in the passion narrative and in innumerable instances of creative human living.
Only thus does God ‘become’ Creator.
A not dissimilar vision is encountered in the novels and spiritual writings of Nikos Kazantzakis. In his bestknown work, The Last Temptation of Christ, we see just this inversion: that instead of a ‘perfect’ Christ arriving in the world to save it from itself, Christ becomes Christ through all the madness, physical suffering and human betrayal that he experiences. When Christ is also understood – as Kazantzakis understood him – as representing universal human possibilities, we may also say that, through Christ human beings become ‘Saviours of God’, perhaps Kazantzakis’ most provocative phrase but one that (despite his excommunication from the Orthodox Church) has a properly theological meaning.
Again, we do not need to be forced into an either/or, but are at liberty to understand this in terms of an expansive reciprocal process, as divine creativity calls forth human creativity that calls forth divine creativity... ad infinitum, or, better, until we experience the breakthrough to the recreation of the image and likeness of God amongst striving, suffering, culpable human beings, to the end that is our beginning.
This is a shortened version of George Pattison’s Conference talk. An uncut, fully referenced version is available from the Editor or on the website www.sofn.org.uk, together with a podcast of the whole recorded talk.
The Rev.Canon George Pattison is Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford.He has published many books,the most recent beingThinking about God in anAge of Technology (OUP,2007) and The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Acumen Publishing,Stocksfield,Northumberland,2005).
Shortened version of George Pattison's Conference talk. Full version with references available from the Editor or at www.sofn.org.uk, with podcast.