You Can't Actually Show the Resurrection
Rowan Williams on what makes art art and what makes art Christian
I come back often to this 2004 debate between Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, and the novelist Philip Pullman, chaired by Robert Butler, Most recently, Iβve been thinking of it because someone drew my attention to Bonoβs re-enactment of a conversation he recalls having had with Franklin Graham:
Now, consider the following exchange, noticing the care with which Williams spells out the relationship of art and religion, imagination and experience:
RW: What you learn, I think, after absorbing a really serious piece of fiction, is not a message. Your world has expanded, your world has enlarged at the end of it, and the more a writer focuses on message, the less expansion there'll be. I think that's why sometimes the most successful, "Christian" fiction is written by people who are not trying hard to be Christian about it. A bit of a paradox, but I'm thinking of Flannery O'Connor, the American writer, my favourite example here. She's somebody who, quite deliberately, doesn't set out to make the points that you might expect her to be making, but wants to build a world in which certain things may become plausible, or tangible, palpable, but not to get a message across.
PP: Isn't this what happens, though, when we read fiction any sort of fiction sympathetically, good fiction, classic fiction? Good art of any sort in fact?
RW: Yes, and I think that's why. Yes.
PP: We're looking for an enlargement of imaginative sympathy, aren't we?
RW: That's right. We're looking for a sense that our present definitions of what it is to be humanβwhat it is to live in the worldβare not necessarily the last word or the exhaustive version of reality, and that the truth is out there in another sense. It's out there in a bigger universe.
PP: Well the truth is in the library, perhaps.
RW: Well, yes, that's true of all serious fiction, all serious drama, all serious poetry. It is about certain kinds of fiction that gives it a religious aura, that poses religious questions, is tougher to answer. I suppose it has to do, perhaps, with some of those characteristically religious themes like absolution (how you live with the past), with the possibilities of forgiveness, and with whatever it is that poses at depth the question of how I relate to my entire environmentβnot just to what's immediately around me, but to my entire environmentβwhich, of course, for a religious person has God as the ultimate shape around it.
PP: Yes. Do you think fiction and drama and poetryβyou mentioned all these three thingsβdo you think they work in different ways? From my point of view, probably, the one of these that is least able to present a religious point of view is drama and the one that is most likely to be able to do it successfully is poetry.
RW: Why is drama the least?
PP: Because the sort of experience that we're talking about, is a private, solitary, internal one, isn't it?
RW: No, not really. I'm not sure I buy that.
PP: I don't want to use just my story to hog the argument, but there's a passage in His Dark Materials, when Mary Malone is on her own wondering and speculating about the nature of this mysterious thing that she's investigating, this thing we call Dust. Now it's a very important passage in the book, but you couldn't show it on stage because all it would consist of is a woman sitting in a tree, thinking.
RW: Yes, I see that. On the other hand, drama is an extremely communal activity. It is something which is necessarily about human interaction...
PP: Well, it's about two human beings relating to each other, isn't it?
RW: That's rightβwhich is why the origins of Western drama are actually ritual and religious, in ways that still surface rather surprisingly. And the kind of event that living theatre is, I think, still very ritualised. And I mean that in a good sense: so that it's bound to be a place where certain emotions and perceptions are allowed out, literally to roam the stage in a corporate environment. It may be inimical to religion interpreted as you have, as solitary wrestling with problems, but what about those themes of corporate purgation, crisis?
PP: Well, you're absolutely right about that, I remember seeing on this very stage the great production of the Oresteia 20 years ago, or whenever it was, and the sense of, yes, corporate, social coming together and understanding of how to deal with these terrible events and terrible feelings. It's a ritual way of dealing with them that satisfies us aesthetically, morally, emotionally and in every other sort of way. Oh, yes I agree with you about that. But the solitary experience, what Wordsworth was talking about for example in Tintern Abbey, something like thatβthat perhaps is a sort of religious experience which can't be dramatised.
RW: That I suppose underlines the fact that religious experience is not one thing. There are lots of things going on: different kinds of artistic activityβ or artistic representationβdo the job in different contexts for different people. Certainly what Wordsworth was talking about is essentially a moment of, in the benign sense, self-awareness. A real awareness of being a person in a living contextβbeing bound up with something immense that sort of runs through his individual awareness. But there are other things I think that religious experience is about. I've spoken about reconciliation, and that I think is something that is harder to do in poetry.
PP: Because you need a story?
RW: You need a story, and you need dramatic interaction.
At this point, the conversation turns to a discussion of film, and how it differs from drama and poetry. Butlerβs opening mistake is an all-too-common one, I believe:
RB: One form we havenβt discussed is film, which works mainly in a very realistic way in representing religious stories. Do you find that a useful approach?
RW: Works in a very realistic wayβdo you think so?
RB: You're encouraged to think you're there, and it's not working, as the theatre does, through metaphor.
RW: I think film is deeply metaphorical and I think that actually, the last thing film does is to represent what's there. To me, it's about the creation of a particular visual sequenceβhighly patterned, highly stylised. Some directors, of course, are much more overt about that than others. It's animated icons rather than representation. Things don't happen like that.
But, if all art is moving reality into another medium, remaking reality, you might almost say, in another medium, film is no exception. So I'm actually very interested in how film does deal with the religious issues, and I'm not talking here about religious films which are often slightly depressing, as you know, simply as art works.
Here, Williams talks at some length about Babetteβs Feast, and uses that film to explain what goes so wrong in so many Christian movies:
My favourite film, with a sort of religious subtext, is Babette's Feast, and there's not very much doctrine in that, not very much overt religiosity, except the rather grim religiosityβthe sort of thing you write aboutβof the old people of the village and their circle. It tells the story of a sort of secular saviour, who has spent all that she has on equipping the people of the village to have an elaborate, pointless, over-the-top feast, in the course of which, sins are confessed and reconciliation is achieved. It's a sort of bloated version of a short story. It's not a realistic depiction of rural life in Denmark, and it's not the film itself that's making a religious point. But watching it, and absorbing what I call the animated icon of it, gives me all sorts of things to reflect on in my own belief system. None of it's realistic, that's not what it's for.
The mistake made by some religious film, the sort of 1950s biblical epic stuff, is to think, well we have got to show religious things happening and we all know what religious things are likeβthey have soft music and the kind of glow around the edges. That's I think why I find it a bit depressing, because it's actually very difficultβand maybe this does pick up on the drama thing againβto represent religious experience anyway, in any context. There's always been that kind of wrestling and tension about, can it be shown? And that's where the sort of easy resolution of something like The Robe or The Ten Commandments really won't do, because what that shows is simply a kind of projection of a religiously-tinged emotionalism. It doesn't show things changingβthat's the hard thing.
Without summarizing Williamsβ argument or reducing it to a few βpoints,β we can say that much depends on the difference between βgetting a message acrossβ and βshowing things changing.β The first is not art, no matter how polished the presentation, and it is also not Christian. It is propaganda, no more. A tool, a weapon, of ideology. It wants to gain and maintain control. Just so, it cannot bear witness to the God who is never useful, never at our disposal.
We might say, then, that what makes art art has to do with what happens when we are no longer either in control or simply expressing ourselves. And what makes art Christian is that it honors, only in the most fitting ways, the inexhaustible goodness that attends our being, the infinite creativity ever already present for us whether we are present to it or not.
***
Toward the end of the conversation, Williams and Pullman turn to a discussion what it means to tell the story of the Gospel well:
RW: The pivotal event is the whole of that Easter complex, if you like, not just the resurrection, which is why a realistic representation of the crucifixion on it's own won't say what has to be said. And curiously, along the history of the church, the way it's been done in the church's liturgy and art very often doesn't seem very realistic in that sense.
You walk through the experience of Holy Week from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday in a sort of ritual way: picking up a bit of the gospels here, a bit of the prophets and the psalms there; performing certain ritual acts (in the Catholic tradition particularly); watching through the night; participating in a very curious and distinctive liturgy for Good Friday, with the bare cross being brought in and unveiled. All of that is an attempt to say what a mere recitation of the story, or a mere photograph, couldn't say.
I remember years ago somebody saying to me that, given the choice between having a video of the Sermon on the Mount, and having half an hour with St Peter after his betrayal, he'd go for the latter because you would see in the complexities, the changes, the tensions, that Peter had undergone, something you wouldn't see just on a video of the sermon - which would land you back in all the problems of what would you really see there, what would you really hear.
PP: This is exactly the heart of the problem of representation isn't it, whether we're talking about a myth or something else. I'm very struck by Karen Armstrong's description in her new book of the difference between myth, which she calls something that is a sort of basic human response to the problems of the great questions of life and death, what she calls logos, the rational attempt to work out answers by using our reason.
Now a rational depiction of the events of Holy Week would have to be a sort of cinema. You'd have to show it cinematically, as I take it that Mel Gibson does. But that would miss the other part wouldn't it? Wouldn't it miss the mythical element of it, which is something that has to be lived and lived and lived again?
RW: That's right.
PP: As an atheist I'm rather on difficult ground here, but presumably this is what a Christian believes.
RW: Yes.
PP: That it is something whose truth is not historical truth only but has a truth that also sort of lives on. Is that right?
RW: Absolutely right and it's a pity that the word mythology has the negative overtones that it has.
PP: That's right because it has connotations of it's only a myth, it's not true, but that's not really what a myth is.
RW: We are, at least, talking about a set of historical events which have, as I would say by God's guidance, become the centre of a vastly complex, imaginative scheme in which the whole of human history and human life gets reorientated. It is shown, liturgically, dramatically, artistically, in ways that constantly transgress those apparently realistic modes. It's interesting that Mel Gibson does pick up one or two of these things in the film. The medieval convention that you show the skull of Adam at the foot of the cross, so the blood runs down on to the skull of Adam - I don't actually imagine that the skull of Adam was on the historical Calvary. In fact, I'd be very surprised indeed. But that is a deeply mythological moment.
PP: But doesn't the audience have to know that it is the skull of Adam? It doesn't come with a label saying Adam's skull, look. So this depends on a sort of shared knowledge?
RW: It depends on a sort of induction into how it all works. Likewise, I was going to mention in the Eastern Orthodox church, how do you show the resurrection? Well you can't actually show the resurrection, because if you try to show Jesus rising from the tomb, you end up with some of those rather embarrassingly awful Renaissance pictures of a sort of luminous figure bouncing out of the tomb on clouds and lots of people sitting around looking rather surprised.
In the Orthodox church what you do is you show Jesus in Hell rescuing Adam and Eve, standing astraddle over a great pit, and grabbing Adam and Eve, pulling them out of their tombs. Again, you need to know what's going on there, but what that's saying is, that the kind of event this is, is really not going to be represented at all effectively, at all adequately, by an attempted pseudo photography.
Finally, Pullman raises the question of fundamentalism, and Williams explains why Christians must reject itβit is no more than a mirror image of the very thing itβs so anxious to be free of:
PP: It's the difference between myth and something that's to be understood literally. Karen Armstrong goes on to make the point that because of this sort of split between these two forms of understanding, the split has resulted in the unfortunate phenomenon of fundamentalism where you get people trying to read a mythical account as if it is a literal account. It says God created the world in six days, it must have been six days, like that. And so you have creation science and that school in Gateshead which is deplorable.
RW: The curious thing about fundamentalism is that I think it's a very, very modern phenomenon. It's a kind of reaction to a scientistic rationalism which says, it couldn't have been like that. And the fundamentalist, instead of saying, βWell, what questionβs being asked here,β immediately bounces back and says, :Oh yes it was!β and you then have a sterile standoff, which doesn't at all get to the level of the mythological and the proper positive sense that you're talking about.
To be literal-minded is deathβwhether that takes the form of an atheistic scientism or an evangelical fundamentalism. Death not only to art, but also to faith. And to both for the same reason.