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The Rev Dr. Giles Fraser |
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Last night at St Paul's we unveiled a new sculpture by Anthony Gormley, hung in the south-west tower stair of the cathedral. In this vertiginous space, with its famous hanging staircase, the human figure at the centre of the work looks a bit like Alice tumbling backwards down the rabbit hole. It's breathtaking. And one of my great pleasures over the last few days has been to hover round the stairwell and listen to the reactions of those visitors who've had a sneak preview. Most people are intrigued and fascinated. But that all too familiar question is never far away: "what does it mean?" And once one person has posed this question another is always keen to leap in with a ready explanation.
As it happens, I'm not terribly keen on explanations of contemporary art just as I'm often not terribly keen on explanations of God. For frequently, when we're confronted by something we do not understand, we grasp too quickly after meaning, often imposing meaning against the grain of an artwork simply as a way of reducing our anxiety at not understanding. We seem to experience 'not understanding' as some sort of threat that must be quickly met and seen off. Yet what many artists say is that it's only when we've given up the attempt to pigeon-hole their work, given up the attempt to set it within a narrative of our own making, that we're free to wonder at the intrinsic beauty and resonance of what's before us. There is an obvious parallel here with theology. For it could be said that a great deal of bad theology is little more than a grasping after meaning motivated simply by a discomfort with all that eludes our understanding. In the face of our anxiety at the unknown, some are ready to impose any meaning or intellectual order, however unconvincing. And this is how theology gets a bad name.
Which is why I'd suggest that at the very heart of all good theology is the concept of revelation. It's not our job to impose meaning or explanation, but simply to attend to something, to concentrate on it and to wait on that meaning which originates within the object of attention itself. The priest and poet RS Thomas for instance writes about prayer as being like spending many years looking out over the sea, waiting for some truth to come and reveal itself, as it were, from offshore.
Revelation is an unfashionable category of understanding, for we like to have meaning in our own hands and under our own control. What God and good art have in common is that we all have to wait for them to reveal themselves in their own terms. They don't come with built in explanations. For mostly these explanations are just expressions of our own impatience. Which is why, with God, as with art, we are often better off with no explanations at all.