The ideas of Creation (God making all things through an act of his will) and Incarnation (God being present to his creation) are the reason for the West’s creativity in the arts and sciences, a creativity instigated by Christian minds building upon the classical past.
If you happen to read any part of Daniel J. Boorstin’s massive and engaging The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination, you should read the fifth chapter, entitled “A Creator God.” Boorstin’s fascinating argument is that Creation is the essential principle of Western civilization. Boorstin further sees this concept as rooted in Western theology. This is one of the richest and most illuminating chapters about civilization that I have read, and a thesis which all Imaginative Conservatives can happily embrace. The beginning is to be found in the book of Exodus, where Moses “announced the paradoxical, mysterious nature of the Creator.” God had of course already been established as the all-powerful Creator of the world in the book of Genesis; complementary to this was the idea of man as the Image of God. The breakthrough, witnessed in the dialogue between Moses and the Lord at the burning bush, is that now God made himself more intimately present to man than before, establishing a personal relationship with him, speaking to him face to face. The idea of Incarnation, which would arrive fully with Christ, is already intimated in the Burning Bush as well as in the codification of the Covenant and Law which signify God’s presence among humanity and “incarnate” God’s will for mankind.
In this way would God graciously placed himself on man’s level and, in doing so, “help man become godlike.” Man would become godlike precisely by exercising his own creative role in the world. The creativeness of God gives rise to the creativeness of man. Man imitates God by being a creator.
Boorstin comments: “Through the five Books of Moses (the Pentateuch) Moses led Western man’s effort to understand the Creation and find a human share in its processes.” It’s worth underlining that the very concept of a single creator God constituted a crucial difference of Jewish religion; some ancient religions and philosophies did not posit a creation at all but rather saw all things as a natural emanation from a primal source. True creation enshrines within it the ideas of choice and will, and these will also make a great difference.
The coming of Christianity deepened this concept of creation and creativity. The classical world accomplished much that was great and good, but it was vitiated (so argues Boorstin) by a fatalistic belief in the cyclical nature of time and a pessimistic concept of history as a continual decline from a primordial Golden Age. Christian belief introduced the idea that the best was yet to come; Original Sin came to Paradise at the beginning of time, it is true, but Christ canceled out this great evil and is leading humanity to a glorious future. Christianity was predicated on the idea of novelty, of something new and wonderful coming into the world: “You have kept the good wine until now.” The very word Gospel means “good news” and assures us that history is moving toward a goal and does not simply consist of endless repetition of what has come before. Boorstin comments, powerfully, that Christianity broke man loose from the wheel of fate. It is not Fortune that rules the world but Providence, and Providence acted decisively in providing a savior to mankind. This event also affects the future in profound ways: now all sorts of things can happen—not merely what has always happened before—and human creativity is unleashed.
Contrary to what some secular folk may believe, the Judeo-Christian worldview was deeply humanist in that it ascribed to man great freedom and creative power. The theological concept of the Logos, founded in the Old Testament, in the Jewish theologian Philo, and the Gospel of John, would become emblematic of the rational and creative principle as originating in God and intelligible by and gifted to man. Creation is nothing less than a conduit from the mind of God to the mind of man, allowing man to share in God’s nature through participation.
It would be impossible to deny that the advent of Christianity led to a new spiritual and cultural order, a new structure built on the classical pediment but going far beyond its distinctive ideas and principles. Further, when we remember that the Jewish world too was involved in the classical world generally, we can see that the two are not mutually exclusive. And if Judaism was part of the classical world, it would seem to follow that Christianity is too, and so the distinction between “classical” and “Christian” is largely artificial and meaningless. Contrary to common oppositions and false dichotomies, what we are dealing with is one continuous storyline of civilization, classical, Jewish, and Christian.
The concepts of Creation and Incarnation have in turn been seen as the essential to the specifically Catholic tradition. Such an apologist as Bishop Robert Barron sees Catholicism as distinguished by its full, unabashed embrace of the reality of the Incarnation of Christ, in contrast to Christian traditions where this reality is somewhat attenuated or not given central emphasis. The concept of Incarnation implies the meeting of the divine and the human, and this has important consequences in culture. It implies that the sacred and the secular are not segregated but closely interconnected. This of course has consequences artistic, social, ethical. It means, among other things, that religion is not confined in the church or cloister walls but bears fruit in the midst of the world. We see this in the history of Christian civilization, in its art, architecture, music, and literature—and scientific discoveries and medical advances. Yes, in spite of the famous and mostly baseless “war between science and religion,” the scientific creativity that the West has shown is undeniably traceable to its Christian just as much as its classical roots.
But let us return to the specifically Catholic tradition. Firstly, what is this tradition? Not, I would say, only a set of doctrines and liturgical practices. In speaking of the Catholic tradition, we are speaking in the broadest sense of a worldview, a tradition of thought and feeling. This is an important point to insist upon, because in my opinion Catholicism is discussed too often as an institution, a hierarchy of power, and the like, and not enough as an ethos or worldview. People get too caught up in the external trappings and fail to see the spiritual essence.
To speak of Catholic Christianity is to a large extent also to speak of Western civilization—in particular what we call the Latin West, the more western portion of the West which used and was formed by the Latin language. As intimated above, we can argue that one of the hallmarks of both the Catholic and the Western tradition is its creativity and fertility. Many outside of the formal boundaries of the Catholic Church would agree with this. When a group of Protestant believers in the 1940s pursued their idea of “the three streams of Christianity,” they identified an emphasis on “incarnation and creation” as the distinctively Catholic idea. Since God became one with human nature, he can be pictured and imagined—the crucial insight that solved the iconoclastic controversy in the early church.
This insight opens the door to the fullness of artistic expression, but an artistic expression that exploits the full depth of the human and the divine, the spiritual and the material, nature and that which surpasses nature. Just think of the wide range of reference and the synthesis of the earthly and the otherworldly in a work like the Divine Comedy. Depicting nature and the human in its fullness in art can only shed beneficial light on other sectors of life and creativity—science, for example—that demand attention to the needs of man in light of his eternal destiny as the bearer of God’s image. The foundational beliefs have both ethical and aesthetic results.
Man is made in God’s image, and the man Jesus restored the image of God in man. Christ’s life has formed and fired Western man’s imagination in its storehouse of imagery, often transmuted into the imagery of the sacraments, rites that transmit God’s grace in tangible form. The specifically Catholic tradition of the Latin West, where the Logos as reasoned reflection has been exploited in full, has caused reason, faith, and imagination to unite and produce creative works of enormous interest to the entire world.
In sum, the ideas of Creation (God making all things through an act of his will) and Incarnation (God being present to his creation) are the reason for the West’s creativity in the arts and sciences, a creativity instigated by Christian minds building upon the classical past. And this creativity, many have argued, finds its specific origin in the Catholic tradition, a tradition that seeks to unite and synthesize faith and reason, revelation and philosophy, matter and spirit, sacred and secular.
It would appear that this full shining forth of Incarnation and Creation is the unique contribution and genius of the Catholic tradition—a contribution which those not within the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church can also claim, reconnect with, and enjoy.
Now, we are bathed in the glory and wonders of the Creation every day, but the works of man can form a barrier that prevents us from seeing the Creation. This is the glory and the danger of human creativity. We have free rein for creation, but our creations sometimes becloud the works of the Creator. It is necessary to purge our senses from time to time, by means of contemplation and silence, and thus refresh the wonder of creation. So that man’s creation (or sub-creation, if you prefer) is not gratuitous, man’s creative power must be properly directed and, yes, limited. Limits and restraint are a necessary part of life. On the practical level, this might mean that we shouldn’t create just anything that comes to mind but should discern what is best and most valuable. We should create with prudence, wisdom, and, above all, a humble spirit before the true Creator, who alone can make worlds from nothing.
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The featured image is “Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura)” (between 1638 and 1639) by Artemisia Gentileschi, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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