An artist produces beauty and beauty naturally rouses love in human beings. In gratitude for the Vision of the Divine brought to us by the great musician, poet, or even beautiful person, we are tempted to worship.
In our dusty modern lives full of noise, entertainment, and work, the artist might have brought us our first glimpse of the Other World of Beauty. It is a great temptation for the actor, writer, artist, or sage to claim to be a guru or little god and for us to grant him a god’s praise.
Both the temptation to worship or to demand worship as payment for our work is great in American culture. We worship our actors and agonize over every detail of their unworthy lives more than the serf of the Middle Ages learned the history of the lives of saints.
And we lack the folk wisdom that even a serf had with his saints. The serf knew to venerate and not worship. The man who venerates is deeply grateful for the human used by God to make beauty, do good, or tell the truth. The thankful man stoops in the Cathedral at the glory, but uses it as a means to a greater End.
He worships the God who made Beauty, is the Good, and is the Truth.
We know no such bounds. The makers of the great cathedrals were unknown, but our artists make sure we know their names and that those names are marketed to us in many ways.
Worship is not cheap in the Cathedral of the Modern Artist.
Who is not tempted to a reverence in the Getty or some other great museum that goes beyond mere veneration (surely licit before such beauty) to worship the art and the artists? We make an idol of our art and of our artists.
We forget no man and no object can be worthy of worship. We mistake the effect and ignore the Cause. We give to the effluvia the honor due to God.
Charles Williams (one answer, though dangerous, to the question: “What should I read if I loved Harry Potter?”) wrote a stunning poem Taliessin Through Logres where Taliessin, the poet to King Arthur sings:
Taliessin stood in the court; he played
a borrowed harp; his voice defined the music.
Languid, the soul of a maid, at service in the hall,
heard, rose, ran fleetly to fall at his feet.Soft there, quiescent in adoration , it sang:
Lord, art thou he that cometh? take me for thine,
The music rang; the king’s poet leaned to cry:
See thou do it not; I too am a man.The king’s poet leaned, catching the outspread hands:
More than the voice is the vision, the kingdom than the king;
the cords of their arms were bands of glory ; the harp
sang her to her feet; sharply, sweetly, she rose.
It is easy to forget that the artists “plays a borrowed harp.” Greater than his voice is the Vision that stands behind it . . . and greater is the Vision of Camelot than Good King Arthur who made it.
It is tempting for me to “worship” a writer like C.S. Lewis who has taught me so much. It is tempting to stand in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Paris and confuse it with God so beautiful is it. It is tempting to me to see a show in London and worship at the feet of Theater and the men and women who made it.
But the Christ is greater than the Church and the Truth greater than Lewis’ defense of it. Every play is just an image of His great stage on which a greater drama is played. I must allow the beauty to lift me up and cause me to stand where I can see Him.
I must never worship art or artist, but only humble myself in worship of the Sublime Artist Who Creates Beauty Out of Nothing.
