Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life

336 Pages·2000·1.45 MB·English

by  Frank Burch Brown

GOOD TASTE, BAD TASTE, & CHRISTIAN TASTE
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GOOD TASTE,
BAD TASTE, &
CHRISTIAN TASTE
Aesthetics in Religious Life
Frank Burch Brown
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2OOO
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2000 by Frank Burch Brown
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, Frank Burch, 1948-
Good taste, bad taste, and Christian taste : aesthetics in
religious life / Frank Burch Brown.
P. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-i9-5i36n-X
i. Christianity and the arts. 2. Aesthetics—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.
BRH5.A8 6785 2000
246—dc2i 99-086563
Selections from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso, trans, by
Allen Mandelbaum. Translation copyright © by Allen Mandelbaum.
Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
"Crow's Theology," from Crow by Ted Hughes. Copyright (1971) by
Ted Hughes. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
"Black Rook in Rainy Weather," from Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath.
Copyright © 1980 by Ted Hughes. Used by permission of Faber and
Faber Ltd. And from Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath, Copyright © 1960
by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
One of Us, by Eric Bazilian
© 1995 Human Boy Music (ASCAP)
All Rights Administered by WB Music Corp.
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission
WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., MIAMI, FL. 33014
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
TO DAVID
AND TO CAMILLA
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Contents
Prologue: Religious Taste ix
One Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste 3
Two Art in Christian Traditions 26
Three From the Love of Religion to the Love of Art 62
Four The Taste for Art and the Thirst for God 95
Five Kitsch, Sacred and Profane: The Question of Quality 128
Six Ecumenical Taste: The Case of Music 160
Seven Making Sacred Places, and Making Places Sacred 199
Eight Styles and Stages of Faith and Art I: The Next Stage 217
Nine Styles and Stages of Faith and Art II:
Practicing Christianity Artfully 252
Notes 271
Index 301
Figure 1. Gustave Dore (1832-1883), The Empyrean (Dante and Beatrice behold the
Celestial Rose, Par. XXXI). From the Dore illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy,
1861. (Dover Pictorial Archive Series)
Prologue
Religious Taste
Shared Taste: A Memoir
Taste may be subjective, but it is not merely private. Almost from the time of
our earliest exchanges, my brother David and I have regularly attempted (with
varying degrees of success) to share music we relish. Sometimes our efforts have
been strenuous. Once we backpacked into the Uinta Mountains of Utah and at
long last sat perspiring on a remote peak. There—using two pairs of headphones,
an adapter plug, and a portable cassette player—we compared several differ-
ent (but all remarkably elevated) performances of the "Sanctus" from Bach's
Mass in B Minor.
That lofty concord and mutuality of tastes has plummeted at other times into
abysmal discord and disagreement. My tastes in "classical" art and music have
been eclectic and almost omnivorous, his more selective and discriminating. And
I have always taken a greater interest than he in jazz and popular music, and in
music worldwide. When serving as a composer-in-residence at various churches,
I occasionally wrote music that he found too popular in its appeal, and there-
fore (to him) unappealing. But we have found that these conflicts in taste, a
predictable feature of any shared passion for the arts, can also be fruitful. And
our passion for the arts has persisted, having become integral to our lives more
generally. David became a professional pianist, music teacher, and composer; I
became a scholar-teacher in religion and the arts with opportunities to compose,
direct a choir, and make music with the piano and sundry other instruments.
For both of us the arts (and not only music) have provided what one could
fairly call "spiritual exercise." They have also served as a primary religious
language. Sometime before David's eighteenth birthday, he confessed—pro-
fessed, really—that were it not for Handel's Messiah he would probably not
have had the capacity to remain a Christian up to that point. Odd as that may
ix