Sunflowers, wheatfields and morality

Here's my article for August:

Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last year I visited the National Gallery in London, and wrote an article reflecting on how just like the Christian artwork displayed there, our society wants to rip Christian values away from their Christian foundations.   But my visit there was definitely worth it as I had another thought while I was there that has inspired this article!!

As I walked around the gallery there were many tour groups with a guide who spoke about the pieces of art and the various movements they belonged to.  They also told you to move away if you got too close, so you didn't get the benefit of their expertise without paying for it!

In one room there was a particularly large crowd gathered around a picture.   As I moved towards the picture, I saw that it was van Gogh's 'Sunflowers'.   This was quite a surprise as I had no idea that that picture was in the National Gallery.  It was also quite a thrill to see this famous picture in real life, and to be able to get close enough to see the brushstrokes.    The tour groups moved on to another room, and I started to look around at the other pictures in that room.  The picture next to 'Sunflowers' was also by van Gogh, and called 'A Wheatfield, with Cypresses'; I found that I was much more captivated by this picture than 'Sunflowers.'  It had swirly clouds and trees and wheat that were all painted in such a way as to look like they were moving – I felt like I was there and could feel the breeze and hear the sounds of rustling.

Another tour group came in going straight to 'Sunflowers' and then leaving after having heard about it.   I felt sorry for 'A Wheatfield' and wondered how often it was overlooked in favour of its move famous neighbour, and then felt sorry for the tour group, who missed out on what I consider the better picture next to the one they concentrated on.  This left me with the question: is an artwork famous because it's good, or good because it's famous?

I'm not an expert in art so I probably don't have much knowledge to contribute to that discussion, but if the question is shifted to the realm of ethics, that's much more in my comfort zone: are certain actions favoured because they are good, or good because they're popular?   Is there an objective moral standard or does society decide what is good or bad?

If society decides which actions are moral acceptable then it becomes very hard to criticise any group for their actions: the UN Declaration of Human Rights might be the moral standard for this time, but there's no reason it can't be altered, or rescinded, in the future.  And even with the UNDHR, some humans, by popular consent, are not covered by its provisions, for example in Iceland nearly all pregnancies with a confirmed Down syndrome diagnosis are terminated.   However, if morality is not to be arbitrarily decided by societal consensus, and it can't be found by looking at the natural world, it needs to grounded in something outside of society, i.e. something that is super-natural.

For Christians, that objective moral standard is not to be found in a distant divine law-giver, but in the God who in intimately involved in the universe he created, and also entered into that universe, becoming human in Jesus.  Jesus not only came to show us what moral perfection looks like in practice, but also to die to take our punishment for failing to keep those moral standards.

From Church to Gallery: what art teaches us about faith

Here's my August article:

The Crucifixion by Jacopo di Cione

The school holidays, and holidays in general, can often involved trips to museums or other places of cultural heritage. This year I went for the first time to the National Gallery in London, and spent a very pleasant couple of hours looking round it. I started in the “Medieval and Early Renaissance” section, where the majority of pictures are paintings on religious themes, usually commissioned for churches and chapels.

As I looked at the pictures, I thought about how they ended up in a gallery rather than being in their original setting. Some would have been moved so that they wouldn't be destroyed during the Reformation. Others came from countries like Italy where this wouldn't have been a danger. However, there was little on the descriptions of the artworks which told you about their journey. But whatever their history, the result is that these artworks, created for sacred spaces and to be used in the context of Christian worship and devotion, are now displayed in a London building to be looked at by thousands of people from all across the world.

This led me to ponder something else: what are all these people thinking about when they look at these artworks? Do they know the biblical stories that are depicted? Do they think of those stories as being true or as being like the Greek myths that other pictures show? Are they inspired to worship or do they just admire the aesthetic or technical qualities?

Although we may not visit art galleries every day, it seems to me that many people live their lives with a similar attitude; they admire the fruits of Christianity but they rip them from their context. As historian Tom Holland showed in his book “Dominion”, the values of Western civilisation derive from the Christian worldview. Values such as equality and compassion, and even our esteem for science are rooted in the Christian faith. Yet our society wants to hold on to these values but reject the Christian narrative and devotion that gave rise to them. Like religious artworks in a gallery, these values might be admired, but they make little sense outside of their original setting.

As Nietzsche famously wrote “When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality”.   An example of this is human rights; as Yuval Noah Harari points out, a secular worldview means that “Human rights...are just a story that we’ve invented. They are not an objective reality; they are not some biological effect about homo sapiens.” Whereas Christianity grounds human rights in the doctrine that God made humans in his image and likeness.

So we have a choice: either try to hold on to Christian values without the Christian faith which underpins them; or come to know the God who makes sense of our most beautiful and cherished values.