Art as a Cosmogonic Sacrament

Reflecting on the Nature of Art

Recently I’ve been thinking about the nature of artistic creation—a topic often spoken about yet extremely slippery and difficult to pin down. Given the diverse scope of artistic expression, a “definition” of art is elusive, and to extend a definition of objectively “good art” nearly evades our grasp altogether. In a Socratic way, I seek to discover the form of art, yet it seems clear to me that the answer must move past material iterations of art and begin with cosmogonic mythology (myths depicting the creation of the cosmos). Art is most fundamentally an act of creation, and as such, the slew of cosmogonic myths provide a coherent model for what we consider art.

Our modern scientistic minds tend to constrict these myths—like Genesis 1-2—into a unidimensional description of how the world came into being. Taken in this way, myth is stripped of its real significance and subsequently dismissed as “scientifically untenable.” However, myths aren’t materialistic descriptions of how the natural world arose in spacetime, rather they capture an event beyond the cosmos in what Mircea Eliade describes as sacred time. Thus, the creation myth in Genesis is a paradigmatic pattern of all creation, and any (re)creation which occurs within profane time participates in and makes manifest the meta-model of the primordial cosmogony. To make this more clear, let’s analyze the pattern of creation as described in Genesis.

The myth poetically begins with the Tohu Va Bohu (“Waters” in Genesis 1:2), meaning formlessness and all that which is unmanifested. It is a reserve of possibility, a container with the potential for all being. The “Spirit of God,” identified with the Logos (Christ) in John 1, hovers upon the water. As a consequence of this interaction between the Spirit and Chaos, God speaks all things into existence in a hierarchical fashion, commencing with light and concluding with man. God then declares all He created as “good” and “very good.”

In this brief but sufficient summation of the creation account, we can denote three constituent characters: Chaos, Logos, and Order. Potential preexists order and only takes form and becomes manifest after it is confronted by Logos. Herein lies the fundamental pattern of every instance of creation. There is a movement from chaos to order, by way of the Logos. Notably, every creation myth, not just Genesis, adheres to this same pattern, even if their characterization of the Spirit of God, chaos, and order may differ.

A deep understanding of this sacrosanct and primordial cosmogony rapidly becomes centrifugal, as it encompasses all forms of creative expression. For instance, what is the painter’s canvas, the poet’s notebook, or the sculptor’s marble if not the domain of formless potential found in Genesis? And what is Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Michelangelo’s Pieta if not the domain of ordered creation which is “good” and “very good.” Accordingly, the artist appropriates the role of the Logos, intensifying the Greek notion of man as the logos-bearing creature beyond rationality and into an artistic space.

Seen through an overtly Christian lens, we can also examine Christ, the Logos, as the redemptive artist, who by His confrontation with chaos (sin, death, and hell) re-creates the world, opening the gates of heaven and bringing about the new Eon. The difference in this creation is that it no longer represents a transcendent pattern operating in sacred time. Rather the paradigmatic model of creation enters into our profane world and sacralizes it. From Christ—the embodiment of love and truth—we can start to narrow down the quality of art, for if the artist embodies the Logos, then to the extent that he creates with love and truth, his art is sacred, holy, good, and beautiful. Naturally, we know this, because we deem a novel good insofar as it captures intricate truths of man and nature. Likewise, how often do we see through the clichéd and untruthful tales of mediocre literature?

At the moment, we’ve collected a half-baked notion of what art is—or at least what creation is—and yet by virtue of this broad pattern, it escapes the narrow scope of mere artistic creation. To the contrary, it seems to universalize artistry to envelope all of life, since Logos bringing order out of chaos is also the pattern of community creation, personal transformation, salvific redemption, and renewal. The paradigmatic creation myths transcend a singular understanding of “art.” This goes to show why Christianity can speak of your life as a saintly masterpiece, or in an inverse way, Nietzsche recognizes an aesthetic beauty to a life wherein you express your will to power.

In an attempt to define art, we’ve really explicated the model of all creative endeavors, whether it be aesthetic or moral. So if we desire to limit art to the visual realm, perhaps an additional remark about the use of tools and mediums are necessary. Then we can firmly illuminate the movement from chaos to order yet circumscribe it with the material world necessary for visual art (e.g., marble and sculpting tools, an instrument, canvas and oil, etc.).

There is one additional point, however, which I find interesting. Broadening our concept of sacrament to any dramatization of a sacred act, artistic expression can become sacramental, a means of communicating and partaking in Divine life. Of course, the artist participates in Divine life only to the extent that he embodies the Logos, necessitating that his art be conducted with a desire for communicating truth and love. The subject of baptism is buried and resurrected with Christ, so too does the artistic draw order out of chaos with the Logos. Outside of spacetime the gods (or God) create reality, and in the act of artistic creation, the profane world is sacralized as the creative pattern residing in sacred time penetrates our world.

So far I’ve pulled together a conglomerate of ideas, both mythological and explicitly Christian, in order to grasp the nature of art. Generally, it’s apparent that art follows the pattern of cosmogony, since the artist transforms potentiality into actuality, chaos into order, something fragmented into something whole. Caravaggio’s canvas is potential, formless, and fragmented, and his Calling of Saint Matthew is actual, formed, and unified, amounting to a beauty which mirrors the goodness of reality seen in Genesis. This model, in my estimation, still evades a solidified definition of art, but it nevertheless reveals a plurality of art’s dimensions. But it also begins to uncover how artistic expression can become a sacramental act, and extending into the ethical domain, how every moment of our moral lives can become sacred.