Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life

Christian Century, Oct 17, 2001 by David A. Hoekema

By Frank Butch Brown. Oxford University Press, 312 pp., $35.00.

FRANK BURCH BROWN is a writer capable of shifting his focus in the space of a few pages from the magnificence of Byzantine worship in tenth-century Constantinople to the Precious Moments Chapel outside Branson, Missouri, which opened to visitors 1,002 years later. In the course of this wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between art and religion, he offers perceptive critiques of John Ruskin's quasi-religious aestheticism, Immanuel Kant's defense of aesthetic autonomy and Mircea Eliade's analysis of sacred space. He also advances his argument for "critical pluralism" in the aesthetic realm by citing the music of Duke Ellington, U2 and the Indigo Girls. The religious dimension of the aesthetic, Burch shows, is no less evident in a story by James Baldwin or a poem by Sylvia Plath than in the music of the church.

Brown's book deserves a wide reading, not just among pastors and church musicians but also among laypeople, for its catholicity and concreteness. Since collections of serious essays in religious aesthetics are few, to say that Good Taste is among the best recent books on its topic is not to say very much. Nor does the author quite deliver on all of the promises made in his opening chapters. Still, the freshness of Brown's approach and the connections he draws between theology, aesthetics and culture make his book valuable.

As holder of a chair in religion and the arts at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Brown has evidently listened carefully to students and colleagues who stand opposed in the worship wars--the stalwart defenders of Lutheran chorales firing verbal sallies against the advocates of synthesizer pop, those who are ready to take up their scourges and drive the drums from the sanctuary, glowering at their fellow parishioners who want to sell the organ for scrap metal. In this study he tries to rise above such skirmishes by embedding issues related to music in worship within a broader context of aesthetic experience and its relation to religious meaning and practice.

Despite the denigration of the arts in the history of the church, particularly in its Protestant branches, Brown believes they deserve a central role in any account of our religious life. He argues that "the evidence of scripture, tradition and experience all suggest that art can sometimes mediate not only a sense of life but also a sense of grace and of the mystery that we call God. And since art cannot mediate without the aid of esthetic imagination, response, and judgment--without taste, in short--we must consider the perhaps surprising possibility that taste at its most encompassing is no less crucial to religious life and faith than is intellectual understanding and moral commitment."

In his opening chapters, Brown seems to be working his way toward a systematic account of the nature of taste and its role in Christian life. He cites the sharply opposing views of Soren Kierkegaard, deeply suspicious of idolatry masquerading as religious art, and William Blake, who embraces all the arts as manifestations of the spirit of God. Brown looks for a middle way, which he eventually anchors not in Kantian or Romantic notions of art as wholly separate from other aspects of life but in "a genuinely integralist approach" foreshadowed in St. Augustine's and Dante's writings.

Augustine is right to see the world itself as a beautiful poem written in God's hand, Brown asserts, but he is wrong to insist that beauty must never be enjoyed for its own sake apart from what it shows us of God. After all, Brown writes, art can facilitate not just a "radical transcendence" that places us in the presence of the holy and a "proximate transcendence" of sacramental reality but also an "immanent transcendence" in which "the sacred is altogether immersed in the ordinary." In response to the murals of Diego Rivera or the photographs of Ansel Adams, Brown suggests, we show reverence for God when we acknowledge an "ineffable presence that is more than sheerly mundane." Contra Augustine, such an experience need have no explicitly religious content.

By the time we reach Brown's closing chapters we realize that what he offers is not so much a theory of the religious aesthetic as a set of guidelines for coping with aesthetic divergence. Taste, he urges, must be "critical yet plural," for "good tastes can conflict." He cites two influential reports on Catholic musical practices, dating from 1992 and 1995, that represent opposing poles: where one report affirms the liturgical appropriateness of every sort of religious music from every culture, the other calls for a renewed emphasis on musical training, established ritual and artistic quality.

Both stances, Brown argues, are incomplete. We cannot surrender to uncritical relativism, as the first report seems to recommend. Too often the attempt to create a style of "blended worship" by combining disparate musical languages yields a "variety show" rather than a coherent act of common worship. But neither should we appeal to the illusory notion of objective standards of taste. Taste is rooted in culture, and cultures exist through the lives of communities. To respect others' aesthetic preferences does not imply that we should seek to satisfy all of them at the same time.