Christianity And The Arts During The Renaissance

There has been a tense relationship between the church and the arts in the past, but a new renaissance appears to be underway. Witness the veritable flood of books on Christianity and the arts in the past decade. There are now at least seven graduate degree programs in Theology and the Arts in the United States, Canada, and the U.K., and several internationally recognized organizations promoting the integration of these two disciplines. Others have written about the healing of the post-Reformation rift between Christianity and the arts; in fact, a whole issue of Direction was devoted to Faith and the Arts. And this buzz about the arts is already filtering into many churches. Thus I think I can take for granted a certain level of comfort
Jacob Burckhardt, writing of the civilizing influence of the Renaissance, says, “In the Middle Ages . . . [m]and was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation. . . . In Italy, man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such”(Burckhardt 81). In an age when there are so many influences dragging us back towards a loss of individuality and personhood (mass consumerism, the “war on terror,” among others), we need art to humanize us again and make us attentive to the image of God in
Their concept of beauty revolved around a sense of balance or symmetry. Symmetry is also a hallmark of justice, as we are reminded by the balance scales Lady Justice carries. When things lack balance or harmony, they are no longer beautiful. An ugly painting, a strip-mined hillside, an arrogant tourist who is disrespectful of a foreign country, an intractable situation where hatred and violence beget more of same . . . all share a quality of ugliness, of something being out of balance. Hans Urs von Balthasar, the great Swiss theologian and aesthetician, wrote that “whoever sneers at [beauty] . . . can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love” (Balthasar 18). Art, because it gives us pleasure and trains us to appreciate beauty, can teach us to recognize “not-beauty” when we see it. World hunger and other problems of injustice will remain until we long for the pleasure of doing good. Dostoyevsky says, at the end of The Idiot, “I believe the world will be saved by beauty” (Dostoyevsky 419 – 20).
Artists have a long history of feeling feared and rejected or at least underappreciated by the church. Many who grew up in Christian communities have left to do their work elsewhere. They have missed out on nurture and discipleship in the faith, and the church has been impoverished in their absence. Christians have encouraged their young people to pursue other “more serious” studies and to leave the