Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Getting Our Sensate Groove Back 

Culture and Politics - Creative Control of the Reformation
 Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 23 April 2012


I recently caused a small stir on Facebook by saying this:

"One of the greatest aesthetic and arististic gifts the world ever received was the casting down of images in the Protestant Reformation."

I thought it might be good for me to explain what was behind that comment, at least a little bit. . . .

I have no problem with evangelicals receiving criticism for producing schlock. That is what criticism (rightly conceived) is for. What I cannot abide is schlock criticism -- memes that make no sense getting endlessly repeated as though they were some kind of wisdom. One of those memes is that evangelicals are unique in their ability to produce this stuff. Anybody who says this cannot have been in a video rental store recently. Evangelicals make bad movies because making good movies is hard, which turns out to be the same reason why people generally make bad movies. Evangelicals make bad movies for the same reason evangelicals have ten toes -- they are people and people tend to generate lots of crapola.


If we want to compare aesthetic contributions, then let us compare the best to the best, or the worst to the worst. Let us not -- unless we want to reveal that we have a mongrel dog in the fight -- compare the best of one to the worst of the other.

And this should be done carefully. When we are talking about the contributions of Christian civilization, I don't mind (at all) Roman Catholics taking pride in Bach, and they shouldn't mind it that I can glory in Dante. But when we come to the crossroads, and we compare Protestant civilization and artistry with Catholic, there are certain things that the facts prevent us from saying. It could be a useful talking point to say that the stripping of the images from the churches constituted an opening salvo in a war on beauty, and was sort of an aesthetic fall from Eden, a point that is just as false as it is convenient.

Keep in mind that I am comparing the general ethos of one form of civilization to another -- I am not talking about whether a particular artist went to Heaven when he died. In this sense, civilizations can even take credit for their heretics and apostates. And, in a slightly different way, we can take some mutual pride in men who passed each other crossing the Tiber, men like Chesterton or Donne.

Also remember that Francis Schaeffer used to talk about the "mannishness of man." Even in the grip of a really bad idea, it is hard to keep the image of God from manifesting itself. Take the Shakers and their radical simplicity. That was some bad whiskey, as far as civilization-building is concerned, but we still got some cool furniture out of it.

So then, be done with the idea that Protestantism "has no artistic soul." Remember my earlier point about Bach and Dante. I understand that we have to factor in Newton's comment about standing on the shoulders of giants -- the magisterial Reformation does not show contempt for the great things accomplished down through church history prior to the Reformation. We know that what came after was built on what went before. But, I would want to argue (alongside Phillip Schaff) that the greatest accomplishment of the Roman Catholic church was Protestantism, and I would want to include the arts in this.

I believe that the elimination of that idolatry in the churches was a great liberation for the people of God, and when the people are set free, like a loosed deer, they make and say beautiful things. "Naphtali is a deer let loose; He uses beautiful words" (Gen. 49:21).

And in the aftermath of that liberation, we do not see aesthetic contributions of the evangelical Reformation going all to blazes. Just the reverse. Protestantism gave us Bach, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Rembrandt, Cranach, Durer, Holbein, Milton, Spenser, Defoe, Wren, Bunyan, and I could keep going with a very long list that ends with C.S. Lewis.

Now I am more than ready to acknowledge that our civilizational high water mark was in part possible because of prep work by earlier Christians before those images came down. But in addition, I want to argue that a lot of it happened because the images came down. Ordinary life was exalted (in much the same ways that the Protestant doctrine of vocation glorified ordinary work), and beauty began to flow over the threshold of Ezekiel's temple, toward its appointed task of inundating the world of the mundane. Glory came to the ordinary, and it was brought there by Protestant missionaries.

The goal was not to destroy holiness, but to get it out of the monasteries. The goal was not to destroy beauty, but to get it out of places where it was being falsely worshipped, and move it to places where it could be innocently enjoyed. Zwingli did take the organ out of the church, that's true enough, but it should also be remembered that he took it to his house. . . .


My favorite Catholic writer is, of course, Chesterton. He once said, in another context, that a courageous man ought to be willing to attack any error, however ancient it is. He also added, however, that there are some errors too old to patronize. The same principle applies here. There are some civilizations that are far too aesthetically accomplished to be patted on the head and told that they have the soul of a badly educated Philistine. And if the critics go on to point out that the mistake we made was our cleansing of the sanctuaries, back before our fathers in the faith brought so many beautiful things into the world, then I will begin to suspect the creation of a brand new fallacy -- post hoc ergo non propter hoc.