‘Art and the Beauty of God: A Christian Understanding’ by Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford

Chagall Windows at Fraümunster Church, Zurich

If Richard Harries is to be believed, beauty is rooted in wholeness, radiance, and harmony and has its origin in God. So, it maybe follows that there’s a ‘spiritual dimension’ to all art forms - and, Harries writes, ‘without an affirmation of beauty, there can in the end be no faith and no God worth our love’. 

But, rather than just fixating on the particular, on ‘its unique individuality of colour, shape, and texture’, he suggests that a Christian appreciation of beauty ‘[sees] in and through the particular’, reconciling specificity with abstraction: perhaps not unlike seeing the details on Chagall’s stained glass window and also seeing the ordinary sunlight transformed into vivid colours which pour through the window. 

Harries names the Incarnation as the ‘supreme expression’ of this ‘special insight’ which Christianity offers on divine beauty. He emphasises how ‘the physical world becomes radiant with eternity and eternity is seen in a transfigured physical world … all everyday experiences have a sacramental character’. 

But Harries’s use of the Incarnation as his example here is perhaps more Catholic or Orthodox than truly ecumenical. E.L. Mascall’s Corpus Christi explains that Protestants tend to ‘look upon this union [of man with God] as consisting an influence exerted upon man by God and in a consequent stimulation of man’s moral powers towards God, rather than in a real communication of God to man’.

It is a bit ironic that when then discussing Christ’s self-emptying and our reciprocal self-giving in and through the Eucharist, Harries doesn’t go as far as he could. Harries explains that ‘God feeds us with himself… and we are changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another’. Yet, this mutual indwelling is more pervasive than Harries acknowledges. One of the prayers after Communion in Order One of the Anglican tradition begins:

Almighty God,

we thank you for feeding us

with the body and blood of your Son Jesus Christ.

Through him we offer you our souls and bodies

to be a living sacrifice.

and, in this way, the prayer acknowledges how, as we are filled with God’s life, we are to emulate this self-emptying. Harries does in fairness gesture a bit towards a sacrificial vocabulary - ‘we seek… to make ourselves available to God, that God’s transforming work might go on through us’ and ‘God’s glory is revealed in humble, self-effacing lives of faith and love’ - but on the whole, it’s something which Art and the Beauty of God could develop further.

I also think this book misses out any real mention of the apophatic tradition, the unknowable silence of God and ‘the radiance of divine Darkness’ in St. Dionysius’s words - at its most extreme, Harries’s cataphatic ‘music of God’ and his effusive declaration that ‘all things will be drawn into the dance’ risks suffocating mystery. For sure, to borrow Fr. Kallistos Ware’s words from The Orthodox Way, the ‘plenitude surpassing all that the human mind can conceive or express’ that ensues from the apophatic method does pose a tension to how Harries somewhat neatly conceptualises human artistry as ‘giving form to recalcitrant matter’. But it is a paradox which I feel was worth Harries unpacking, if, according to him, a ‘sense of beauty and its value… is an indispensable prerequisite of love and prayer’.

Even so, Harries resists reducing God to something which can be fully seen, or experienced, or articulated. He posits, ‘God is the source of all our longing’, and that there is within him a ‘spiritual loveliness which breaks down our resistance and wins us to him’. It is his ineffable divine personhood which, as Harries marvels, can ‘sometimes be discerned’ and to which Art and the Beauty of God‘s vision of Christian aesthetics bears imaginative witness.