104 - A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts and the Church

A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts and the Church

By John Dillenberger

New York, Crossroad, 1986. 280 Pp. $22.50.

John Dillenberger's latest essay into the interrelation of religion and art is specifically directed to the church with its plea for the relevance of the visual arts to the contemporary church, which not only disregards but perhaps even fears the visual image. He prepares his reader to understand this imago-phobia by devoting the first section of the book to a historical study of what he calls "formative historical junctures" in the relation of the visual arts to the church. This project includes explications of the theological impact of the visual monuments that he presents, but the most telling moments of this history appear when there is little or nothing to illustrate because of the limitations that theology or polity put on art. There are other "theologies of objects." John Dixon's Art and the Theological Imagination is perhaps the outstanding example of that mode. The attitude of the church towards objects is another kind of story.

105 - A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts and the Church

Dillenberger, in his role as historical theologian, traces iconoclasm and its clones from the scriptural interpretations of the early church to modern fears of sensuality and opulance. The Protestant predicament over images is pulled into perspective. The panoramic scale of the discussion does not allow for the tightly documented coverage of Dillenberger's study of The Visual Arts and Christianity in America: The Colonial Period through the Nineteenth Century. This earlier volume is couched as historical documentation. The current work sets forth arguments for serious consideration of how the visual arts should be an integral part of the religious life and theological education of the 1980s.

When the flow of time reaches the twentieth century, section two of the book, the discussion is splintered into consideration of art, architecture, and theological positions that have implications for art. The part on art revisits the catalogue that John and Jane Dillenberger wrote for the exhibition Perception of the Spirit, in 1976, while the delineation of theological opinion was delivered to and published by the American Academy of Religion.

Exhibition catalogues are bits of ephemera that, because they are published by museums and art galleries rather than regular publishing houses, are never seen and so not collected by the ordinary library. This replication then gives access to images not easily available to the general reader. Many references are also made to infrequently published and unusual styles of well-known artists, as well as to artists whose work is regretfully known only to small circles. The fact that the curious reader will not easily find reproductions of these works, even in some well endowed art history libraries, is a reminder that the world of images is terribly broad and various.

The tantalizing introduction to attitudes toward art among contemporary theologians can only be brief, but provides the necessary references to original statements. Barth and Tillich are included because of the continual influence of these older giants, but most references, from Cobb to Tracy, are from the 1980s. Art historians will stand up and applaud Dillenberger's note of how several theologians treat the critical opinion of Andre Malraux as fact rather than interpretation and therefore weaken their arguments. But further reflection reminds the art historian and everyone else of the pitfalls beneath the initial glamour of using material from another field.

Dillenberger is more involved with the idea that the church has deserted art out of fear and out of "a truncated religious ethic [that] believes it helps the poor by modesty without style." The ethic of aesthetics is an important argument yet to be made significant to the churches. There are many ideas for future development inherent in the arguments of this volume.

In his final section, Dillenberger goes on to advocate "a theology of wider sensibilities" and to attempt to persuade his clerical reader that the contemporary situation is one in which language has lost its power of

106 - A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts and the Church

imagination and definition. As a historical theologian, he describes the current sterility of the definitional theology the church has followed since the sixteenth century. He challenges it to reclaim in a contemporary mode something of the suggestive qualities of pre-Reformation theology.

These latter arguments are presented in passionate but abstract formulation, although with the concrete proposal that seminaries take seriously the education of the sensibilities of their students. The significance of his ideas may not become apparent until there are enough " educated sensibilities" among clergy and theologians to understand the richness, indeed the refreshing perspective, that these attitudes can bring to the task of the church.

MARJORIE SCHREIBER KINSEY

University of Notre Dame
South Bend, Indiana