The Depth Dimension
The Depth Dimension
Matthew Lawrence Campbell
All I remember is the cold—that and how tired I felt as an eight year old trekking through the forest. "In the interest of time," my dad had said, "we should probably cut through this bowl here, as opposed to trying to circle around it. We might even get lucky and flush something out while we're at it. What do you think, Matthew?" I don't exactly remember what I said in reply.
The previous night had seen to it that Arizona's White Mountains, that sprawling vastness of alpine plain and rising peak situated atop the state's northeastern plateau, received their first official snow of the year, and I had emerged from my tent earlier that dawn to behold a world utterly transfigured in white… not to mention about 30 degrees colder for it.
But of course, we weren't there for the winter views, beautiful as they were. Rather, we were perched atop that ridgeline somewhere in the middle of the Arizona wilderness, binoculars dangling about our necks and shotguns at the ready, on the hunt for wild turkey. We had been roughing it for days by then and with absolutely no sign of them. Not so much as a single footprint from among the fallen leaves or tangled bramble to season our wandering with prospect and aim. In my worst moments, I had even begun to wonder whether the whole trip wasn't some kind of cruel ruse on the part of Powers who enjoyed subjecting unwitting eight year olds and their fathers to long days of pointless striving. But that day felt different. Cold and tired as I was, something about the way the rising sun broke soft and clear through the snow-laden trees lent the morning a special air of renewed hope. Confidence, even. We took a moment to pause. To take in the grandeur of the waking world around us. To savor its magnitude and scope. And then we were off…
*
The topic of "art and faith" has always struck me as somewhat odd. For as fashionable and animated as our discussions about it are today, throughout most of human history, the vast majority of people on this planet, regardless of which God or gods they happened to believe in, would likely never have thought to consider the matter. Now, it's not as if cultures of the past never bothered to reflect upon such things as the meaning of art and beauty and their relation to ultimate reality, but when it comes to art and faith as definable ways of life—as concrete "modes" of "being in the world”—most would have simply taken it for granted that the two not only fail to contradict each other, but in fact constitute natural extensions of the same living whole. Among Christians, for instance, there would have been no hard and fast distinction between the spiritual message of the Gospel, on the one hand, and the creative exertions of the Church's many painters, illuminators, architects, composers and sculptors on the other. That one should have to struggle to reconcile the two would thus have been as outlandish a prospect as it would have been just plain inconceivable, simply because the Way of Jesus and the Way of Beauty flowed self-evidently from a single source: God's own Self.
I say this, because I think it's important to appreciate just how much our collective wrangling with and enthusiasm for this issue in modern times is contextually determined—a function, that is, of the attitudes and assumptions that lie at the heart of our culture's current conception of reality. Difficult as it is to imagine from our modern cultural lens, there was a time when the cosmos positively dripped with divine agency and intent. All that is, visible and invisible, mundane and sublime—from the patterned course of the stars to the structure of society, from the ordering of the seasons to the most intimate stirrings of the soul—all bore witness in some fashion to the presence and unifying power of the numinous. Reality, you might say, was like a marvelous tapestry: dazzlingly variegated and complex, but also harmoniously proportioned and teleologically imbued.
But things are much different now. By and large, we tend to envisage creation as a cold, inert, and arbitrary thing. More a random assemblage of lifeless mechanical parts than anything else. For the most part, we probe and dissect creation as if it were an anonymous cadaver on the examination block, not a miracle in whose secret depths the inscrutable lineaments of a Face flash forth.
*
The Prussian sociologist, Max Weber, was the first to assign this shift in perspective a name and to put it to rigorous use. Since the scientific revolution and the emergence of an industrial, bureaucratized social economy, he argued, Western culture has fallen prey to a gradual process of "disenchantment." In our collective efforts to rationally decode the natural world and bend it to our will, we've simultaneously stripped it of its "primal magic”—its inherent capacity to elicit an encounter with the Divine via reverence and awe. Deprived of this crucial "depth dimension,” creation is now a barren and hollowed-out semblance of its former self. From the vantage point of an additional hundred years on Weber, I would only add that it's become a terribly fragmented and alienated one, as well. All our technological and scientific progress over recent years, in other words, has come at a high price: estrangement from ourselves, each other, the natural world—from the ground of Being itself. And no number of digital distractions, trips across the world in search of "authentic experiences," or craft IPA's can ultimately hide that fact, much less dull the pain left in its wake. We are isolated and adrift like never before.
In a way, then, the modern age amounts to one long test case in what a universe without a transcendental source for its unity, stability, and identity invariably comes to look like: the dismemberment of life's "whole" into compartmentalized, self-enclosed parts; the proliferation of unnatural dualisms and antagonisms; the desperate clinging to rigid forms of certainty in order to counteract a mounting sense of one's meaninglessness and anxiety; contempt for the body and of material order more generally… In short, everything breaks apart and unravels. Not even the church, which is supposed to operate as a sign of a healed and divinized humanity, has proven immune. For who can deny the presence of many Christians today, especially here in America, who would seem to equate orthodoxy with the adoption of an attitude of suspicion, if not outright hostility, towards a "Godless" outside world? Such Christians like to make a great display of their principled stance against the erring course of secular society without stopping to consider that, in doing so, they often dispense with one of the central pillars of the Gospel's message, namely, that God's creative activity, goodness, and beauty are at work everywhere and at all times—not just within the insular hold-outs of their church communities. Since orthodoxy in their construal is less a living, breathing thing than a reductive list of answers to pre-formulated questions, anything smacking of novelty or surprise—the events and developments of history, recent cultural trends, and new insights, for example—is reflexively branded a potential source of contagion, something to fear. Naturally, the irony here is that, precisely in its reactive posture towards modernity, much of what passes for "orthodoxy" today ends up looking and behaving every bit as modern as the next thing.
In any case, when it comes to art, it seems to me that the clearest indication that disenchantment has infected a Christian's soul is when she experiences a knee-jerk impulse to want to "christianize" any form of art that doesn't immediately present itself as "christian." Unsurprisingly, the results of her endeavors usually end up being a painfully forced mixture of both kitsch and portentousness. Which is to say, they lack the mark of true, lasting works of beauty, because they proceed from the faulty (and thoroughly modern) assumption that the natural and the supernatural are fundamentally separate—as opposed to inextricably inter-braided—discourses. You'll recall that the hallmark of a disenchanted mind is the conviction, however unstated, that creation has ceased to be a locus of Theophany, a conduit of the Divine Life and Presence in whose image it was self-evidently made. For the Christian wanting to make art, this implies that a poem or a painting can't just be about the flowers on the windowsill, or the sound of women laughing through the lemon trees; it has to be explicitly about God in order to precipitate an encounter with Him. Left to themselves, the sights, sounds, and smells of our mundane experience are at best deficient, and at worst downright threatening. The believer, therefore, has to come in after the fact and supplement them with an extrinsic layer of spiritual subject matter if they are ultimately to amount to anything.
*
After about 20 or so minutes of picking our way down the mountainside, Dad and I emerged from the pine, out of breath and coated in needles, reaching a clearing at the bottom of the bowl. Just opposite, about 50 feet on, stood a grove of aspen decked out in full autumn splendor. As we stepped over the boundary, though, it was more as if we had stumbled unaware into the heart of some massive fire. Save for the white bodies of the aspen themselves standing everything about us was a riotous conflagration of reds, oranges, and yellows. Morning mist rose like smoke through the tree-trunk colonnade in graceful grand adages of holy praise. It seemed to me then that we had chanced upon a secret the forest must have been guarding, so quiet and so pristine was the stillness that enveloped us. Still technically on the hunt, our feet traversed the leaf-down forest floor, but all thought of turkey had long since fled our minds…
We never did manage to bag a turkey on that hunting trip. Chalk it up to inexperience or just plain bad luck on my part. But amidst the silent stature of those aspen trees, I had been gifted something far greater and more enduring. Something which, though it only lasted only a few moments, has been grafted into my blood, seared into the marrow of my being, for all time. And I thank God for it.
*
I'd like to suggest that the problem we Christian artists encounter today—this seemingly unbridgeable divide many of us experience between our faith and creative lives—is in large measure an artificial one. That's not to say it isn't serious or doesn't warrant our attention. But what it does mean is that it needn't be there. We can change it if we want to. But that, in turn, requires a willingness on our parts to go inward. We have to summon the courage to recover within ourselves an authentic love of mystery, a genuine openness to the unpredictability, risk, and play of existence. Put differently, we need to remember that the starting point of any orthodoxy worth its salt will always be the eternal mystery of the Incarnation, the act whereby God leaves the security of His Trinitarian abode to take on not only the flesh of our humanity, but also the flesh of all created being, thereby wedding it to Himself for all time. Indeed, to the incarnation-grounded orthodoxy, each tree, each blade of grass, each flash of thrush-wing among the briarwood participates in the Redemption. Each thing of beauty, whether man-made or natural, has a place marked for it in the Kingdom to come and yet already and mysteriously in our midst. Such an orthodoxy accustoms the eyes of the believer to view creation through the lens of Genesis 1—that is, as "very good." Doubtless, creation is wounded, subject to death and sin, pain and suffering… but "very good" all the same. And precisely because of this "very good," it still retains the indelible stamp of its Creator. In its inviolable core, the Wisdom and Beauty of its Creator still burn softly, silently, like hearth-ember. Far from stifling the vital impulses at creativity's ground, then, true orthodoxy can and should enhance them.
Matthew Lawrence Campbell
Writer & Poet
Photography by Philipp Pilz