The Avant-Garde Path to God

Early in his 2009 BBC documentary, Why Beauty Matters, the late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton described seeing Michelangelo’s Pietà for the first time. Gazing on the 15th-century sculpture, which depicts Mary holding Christ after the crucifixion, was a “transporting experience” for Scruton and informed his later view that art can, in its pursuit of beauty, “raise us to a higher moral or spiritual plane.” As he said in the film, “My life was changed by this.”

To Scruton, the contemporary art popularized in Europe and North America throughout much of the 20th century could never provoke such a transformation in a viewer. He argued that abstract, experimental, and conceptual art merely strives to “disturb” or “break moral taboos.” He referred repeatedly to Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 work Fountain, an inverted urinal, as emblematic of an artistic propensity to shock and assert that “anything is art.” Many other traditionalists have made a version of Scruton’s critique, insisting that contemporary art reflects self-indulgent, relativistic, and impious tendencies. As one reactionary influencer said in a YouTube video, “The purpose of modern art is just to rebel against beauty.”

With these sweeping assessments in mind, I was interested to read James K. A. Smith’s latest book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing. Like the above traditionalist critics, Smith comes from a faith background: He’s a philosopher at Calvin University (a Christian institution) and a former preacher. And like those critics, he’s deeply skeptical of certain intellectual currents in contemporary culture. But he does not share Scruton’s and others’ distaste for modern art. Smith writes that, far from being spiritually vapid, such art can lead viewers to a “contemplative posture that might make us open to the mystical.” Abstract and experimental art, he argues, is innovative, meaningful, and conducive to the sort of habits that can bring people closer to God.

[Read: What atheism could not explain]

To the credit of Scruton and other critics, the history of post-Renaissance European (and, later, North American) art can be understood as a movement toward secularization and self-expression. Many artists within this tradition went from seeking to imitate the beauty of the world to expressing their subjective experience. The desire to be original and authentic, and to use the creative process as a form of discovery and self-expression, largely replaced overt concerns with God. Raphael’s Madonna gave way to Mark Rothko’s rectangles.

But contemporary art does have spiritual value, Smith argues, for its ability to draw viewers into “new modes of awareness” and to contend with uncertainty. He recalls, for example, seeing Agnes Martin’s Friendship, a large gold-leaf panel made up of hundreds of grid-forming lines. The painting, like other abstract works, tells no discernible story. Rather than trying to extract a point, to “get it,” Smith focused on the meticulousness of Martin’s hand-scored pattern. He began to envision her working with “singular attention and tenacious tedium.” In Smith’s attentiveness, the painting became a locus of communion, one that linked him to the artist who made it.

Smith also writes of beholding El Omrane, by the Swiss artist Helmut Federle. The painting is imposing, almost as tall as a basketball hoop and as long as a sedan. It’s also ominous, a patchlike gray void without an obvious focal point. But trying to describe it shows the limits of the sayable. As Smith notes, a work such as El Omrane bypasses “well-honed habits of discursive control.” It prompts “a form of concentration” distinct from forming an opinion or solving a dilemma; it invites contemplation, not argument.

Engaging with modern artworks such as these turned Smith toward habits and practices developed long before Martin or Federle had picked up a paintbrush. Christian mystics throughout the centuries—Smith writes, for instance, of the 16th century’s Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, among many others—explored the ways in which retreating into solitude or letting the world slip amid silence had the potential to yield profound spiritual insights. The mystics were also attuned to the limits of language. The medieval text The Cloud of Unknowing advises those seeking God to “focus on the God who made you and ransomed you and led you to this work. Think of nothing else. Even these thoughts are superfluous.” Centuries before contemporary artists presented a way to pay attention without words, the mystics had searched for it.

Smith’s book doesn’t take on the more scathing critiques of contemporary art, such as Scruton’s. He also doesn’t address how some conceptual works can undermine spiritual contemplation. (It’s hard to imagine, for example, how he might make the case that Duchamp’s Fountain could offer mystical insights about the divine.)

But if Smith can seem, at times, too enthusiastic about the edifying potential of contemporary art, the traditionalist critics can be recklessly dismissive. To many of them, abstraction and experimentation amount, at best, to “melancholy repetitiveness,” as Scruton said of Rothko. When faced with an avant-garde painting, many of them see “nothing discernible,” as the right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh put it.

[Read: The evidence that God exists]

What these critics don’t reckon with enough is that inscrutability is also a feature of the world. In their campaign to glorify objective beauty, they fail to note that moments of incomprehension and uncertainty are natural parts of life, worthy of examination. The attempt by contemporary artists to convey these moments, and to do so without resorting to a vocabulary that pulls the viewer back to a false sense of certainty, has a beauty to it. Moreover, the traditionalist critics of contemporary art downplay that an embrace of mystery is key to understanding God. As Augustine wrote, philosophy “cannot penetrate the inscrutable wisdom of God.”

Smith doesn’t expect any given artwork to affect all viewers. Art isn’t programmable like that. But he does write that, for him, “encountering art for which we don’t yet have established habits”—art more like Martin’s, less like Michelangelo’s—ultimately “turned the gallery into an oratory.”

On a recent afternoon, I visited Washington’s National Gallery of Art to see the lone Martin work on view there: Untitled #2. The 1981 painting is abstract and minimalist, a compilation of placid shades—pink, blue, and white lines—stacked horizontally. Pretty soon, I was counting them, first one by one, then in clusters, top to bottom, bottom to top. Through my reflexive tallying, I was unwittingly demonstrating a recurring theme in Smith’s book: an obsession with certainty, a reflex to decipher this work of art.

Yet after I’d counted the painting’s lines for a while, I no longer cared about determining the number, and I slipped into a metronomic focus. The painting didn’t fully overcome my own habits of “discursive control”—I was still associating, grasping for words. But it was far from a gratuitous provocation. Martin and I shared a moment. If art such as hers can inspire a sense of connection like that, it very well could point heavenward.

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