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Is our genius doing the work of Genesis?
Have earthly artists unseated the Creator, wonders John Saxbee
 Work of creation: Michelangelo’s Moses, in a 19th-century plaster cast by André Desachy. From The Making of Sculpture: The materials and techniques of European sculpture, edited by Marjorie Trusted (V&A Publications, £24.99 (CT bookshop £22.50); 978-1-851-77507-1). It considers sculptures in wax, terracotta, bronze, marble, alabaster, stone, ivory, wood, and semi-precious materials; and the design proecess of sculpture, from drawings or clay sketches to the finished work |
| Creation: Artists, gods and origins Peter Conrad
Thames & Hudson £24.95 (978-0-500-51356-9) Church Times Bookshop £22.45 THIS IS an expansive book of massive erudition. Its author teaches English at Oxford, and here he brings together the fruits of a life-time’s engagement with aesthetics, theology, and science. He calls the book “a celebration of art that doubles as a critique of religion”. This immediately alerts us to a suspicion that we are being offered mutually exclusive alternatives that are not mutually exclusive at all. Although Conrad “finds it easier to believe in human creators than in their divine prototype”, he struggles to convince us that the latter must have been, and has been, seen off by the combined forces of scientific progress and artistic genius. Indeed, it is hard to tell whether he believes human creativity has filled a vacuum resulting from God’s death at the hands of scientific materialism, or whether artists have conspired to dethrone the Creator in order to take his place. Either way, we are taken on a challenging and somewhat idiosyncratic journey in 33 dense and detailed chapters, from biblical and Greek accounts of Creation through to Hiroshima and 9/11, which purport to prove that a creation capable of being destroyed by human beings cannot be of divine origin. Conrad finds grist to his mill in the writings of Plato, Ovid, Augustine, and Aquinas, but it is essentially the Renaissance that “altered the balance of power between man and God”. Leon Battista Alberti in his book On Painting (1436) asserts that the painter was not God’s grandson, but “another God”. This opens the way for Conrad to invoke what he would think of, quite literally, as a pantheon of painters, poets, and musicians who rejected the limitations placed on their creativity by the requirements of religion. The likes of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Turner, Dickens, Wagner, Nietzsche, and Schoenberg feature in this pantheon, as God the Creator retreats in the face of Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationalism. Whether the artist is seen as one who creates order out of chaos, or as one who sees chaos as itself creative, the new reality is that “genius does the work of Genesis.” Some of these artists have to be manipulated by Conrad in order to fulfil the brave new role he has assigned to them. For example, he quotes Stendhal’s observation that in The Creation “Haydn’s genius shines forth . . . in all its glory,” and asks: “Did it perhaps eclipse the glory of God?” No, it didn’t! Of course, some would have no difficulty in identifying themselves with the elevated status Conrad accords them. Wagner features prominently, as does Nietzsche. On the other hand, Stravinsky was adamant that “Only God can create,” and that his own desire to create is but a reflection of his creatureliness. So we come back to Conrad’s fundamental premise. Is he right to set human creativity over against the creativity of God? Perhaps we are most made in the image of God when we are making things, in-cluding works of art. It cannot be denied that works of great art achieve a kind of creative power that opens windows on to the divine, but it remains doubtful whether the creator God has to abdicate in order for that to happen. This is a tour de force by any standards. Cameos, including the Lascaux Caves, alchemy, steam engines, Mr Quilp, and a selection of science-fiction films, sparkle in the broad sweep of Conrad’s compass. He does more than enough to convince us of his own creative and critical genius, but he could have benefited from the aesthetical insights of a Hegel or a Kierkegaard to convince him that, still, “In the beginning, God . . .” Dr Saxbee is the Bishop of Lincoln. To order either book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop price") |
