“Separating the art from the artist” is a classic interminable debate. Salvador Dalí was a fascist (when he wasn’t a communist–some people just want to be weird). Ezra Pound was a fascist, Heidegger was Nazi-curious, and then there are all the Stalinists and Maoists in self-consciously avant garde communities of the early (and middle-, and late-) 20th century.
Bringing spirituality into it adds more layers of complexity, because while we like to think that righteous people are better able to produce more inspiring art, it runs into a lot of examples where very fallen people have created great art, literature, and music.
While highly fictionalized (Salieri was actually a good guy), the masterful cinematic depiction of this struggle is the multi-Academy Award winning movie Amadeus, where Mozart’s rival comes to despise God out of resentment for not giving him, the devoted, sacrificing Christian, the divine gift of musical inspiration that was given to the crass, foppish, irreverent Mozart.
Half of John Donne’s corpus is considered some of the greatest metaphysical, religious poetry ever written, and the other half is him trying to get women to sleep with him.
Moving to the Latter-day Saint space, it was tragic when it was discovered that Sterling Van Wagenen, the founder of the Sundance Film Festival who later went on to direct the latest Endowment film, was convicted of child sexual abuse. The thing is…I actually thought his Endowment film was by far the most artistically and spiritually powerful of that genre.
Dramatically moving the goalposts, while we might want to think that the added spirit we have as Latter-day Saints through the Gift of the Holy Ghost can give us an edge in the artistic realm, ironically perhaps the most recognizable pieces of Latter-day Saint-themed art that adorn our temples and chapels were created by non-members. Seventh-day Adventist Harry Anderson created the iconic depiction of Christ descending from the clouds. And then even more poignantly, the statue of the Angel Moroni that tops the Salt Lake Temple and was the pattern for all subsequent Angel Moroni’s was created by a child of ex-members from Springville, Utah. When he was asked to create the statue Cyrus Edwin Dallin had by then converted to Unitarianism and declined, but later changed his mind and very ecumenically stated that “My angel Moroni brought me nearer to God than anything I ever did.” (Sidebar, kudos to early Church leaders for being open-minded enough to outsource artistic work to devout Christians of other faiths).
So how? This isn’t going to be a hot take for the kind of people who read bloggernacle material, but the common belief that you have to qualify for the spirit through your own merits is wrong. You see this a lot in the mission field. If you don’t do X,Y, or Z and do the five steps of blah blah, then you won’t have the spirit. To some extent this is true, especially for people who aren’t even searching for the spirit. I doubt Hugh Hefner could produce spiritually profound issue of the Ensign even if he tried.
Still, with a little more life experience you learn that the spirit goes where it listeth. It strikes when you’re in the pit of sinful despair like Alma, it strikes after you just swore at your kids. It can’t be coerced (although it can be influenced) by behaviors, tokenism, or rituals, and God sometimes grants His inspiration to people of good intent who are seeking for it even if they don’t check all the boxes (or even some major ones).*
*To be clear, some may interpret this as me downplaying the severity of Van Wagenen’s crime or its effects on his victims when that’s not my intent at all. The only point I’m making is that even if you do one of the most horrendous things possible, God doesn’t automatically extirpate the artistic gifts you were given. That’s just an empirical fact. What we do with their art is a whole other, complicated issue that I don’t address here. For example, the Vatican has ordered the removal of the art of Marko Rupnik, a priest who almost certainly abused dozens of women. But on the other hand, should we never screen Triumph of the Will the piece of Nazi propaganda that was cinematographically/technically revolutionary for its time? Again, it’s a complicated issue that I’m not going to try to resolve here.
Comments
8 responses to “Spiritually Inspirational Art by Not-So-Inspirational Artists”
Samson comes to mind as a cautionary tale … seems more a reflection of how we use our gifts in the final accounting, than a reflection of whether the Spirit touches us to create something in some moment.
This isn’t unique to art, though it definitely applies to art. We’re rightly comfortable saying that the Lord uses imperfect people to do his work, but what about people we might reasonably label as “bad”?
It’s worth asking whether the Lord recognizes a difference. I think a case can be made from the Book of Mormon that the Lord puts people who deliberately harm others in their own category (call it “the wicked”), and they’re the ones who are proactively punished. See 3 Nephi 10:12, for example. But it’s not a slam dunk.
The best-explained example of the Lord using bad people is the King of Assyria in Isaiah 10/2 Nephi 20, but his “contribution” to the Lord’s work (destroying Israel) is bad and Isaiah makes it clear he’ll still be punished for it. I’d put Christopher Columbus in the same category, and insist that the Spirit of the Lord may have “wrought upon” him to persist in sailing west, but not to underestimate the size of the Earth and definitely not to enslave or murder the people he met when he got there.
But the post focuses on people who make positive contributions to the Lord’s work despite their own failings. Thomas Jefferson stands out to me here: it seems to me that it must have taken the influence of the Holy Ghost to make a slaveowner write such true and stirring words about equality and unalienable rights.
I think Steven’s right that the Spirit sometimes surprises us by whom it inspires…and by when it inspires us. I love his last paragraph. We need to stop judging–if we refuse the fruits of inspiration because the person inspired also harmed others, we’ll cut ourselves off from a lot of beauty and a lot of wisdom. God will ensure there is justice for perpetrators and healing for victims.
(Samson is definitely a cautionary tale, but in a different direction. His flaw was to take the gift the Lord gave him–his strength–and use it for selfish purposes rather than to free Israel like the judges had before him. That and flouting his Nazarite vow: all that bizarreness about eating from lion corpses and fighting with jawbones is there to illustrate that he was ignoring the rule that Nazarites can’t touch the dead. It was when he finally abandoned the last remnant of the Nazarite vow, never to cut his hair, that the Lord withdrew his gift. Most likely Samson no longer believed it was a gift.)
Adam F: Good example.
RLD: WRT the King of Assyria, I do think the idea of God using bad people to, say, punish his chosen people (Assyria is going to Assyria after all) is less complicated than God using somebody *to create an inspired work of art.*
RLD
It is difficult to overstate the problems Jefferson had as a human being. His longtime mistress was one of his slaves. She bore him 3 children. She went to Paris with him while he was serving as Ambassador to France. His mistress planned to stay in France because she could live free there. She finally agreed to return to the US after Jefferson agreed to free THEIR children. He never did free his mistress. This is the man who wrote that all men are created equal.
Jefferson’s relationship with his slave was first publicized by Faun Brody. The historian who also wrote “No Man Knows My History.” She was the niece of DOM. When you visit Jefferson’s Monticello, the Park Service is very open about his relationship with his slave. (Unless Trump has deleted it.)
Clearly Jefferson cared for his significant other. She was an important part of his life. Whether it was some primitive form of love or an emotional dependence we will never know. But clearly the man whose image is on Mt Rushmore was a seriously flawed individual.
From a Christian religious perspective, Jefferson had interesting beliefs. He was for the most part a Deist. He developed his own version of the NT by deleting all Christ’s miracles. This doesn’t play well with Christian Nationalists.
This all leads up to the issue of God’s role in Jefferson’s life. Was he divinely inspired to be the principal author of the Declaration? I think not. Was he important in the founding of America? Obviously, Yes. Was America born a Christian nation? Clearly, not.
@rogerdhansen: Yes, that’s all true. That’s why I think it probably took divine intervention for such a man to write such true and inspiring words about equality that they became part of our national creed, but that’s a minor point. The real question is, what are we to do with those words?
If we discard them because the man who wrote them also did horrible things, we dismiss all the good they have done–including Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King using them to call our nation to repentance–and can yet do. At a time when our President and Vice President have both advocated for abandoning the classical liberalism of the founders, we can’t afford that. And yet we mustn’t whitewash the sins of the founders either, lest we ignore the ongoing consequences of those sins.
That’s why I land on “judge not, that ye be not judged.” We don’t need to judge Thomas Jefferson, the man. We can judge his actions individually, keep the good, and reject the bad. And to bring it back to the topic of the post, I think we can do the same with art created by flawed artists.
My point is: it’s seriously bizarre to try and decide which parts of a flawed artist’s life is inspired and what part should be ignored. So we Mormons want to believe that Christopher Columbus was inspired to “discover” the Americas. From the point of view of Native Americans who suffered extreme genicide had their civilizations destroyed, this act was hardly inspired.
Many creative people suffer from mental illness. How do you decide what part of their work is inspired and want part is a function of their unique neurology? An excellent example of this is Vincent Van Gogh. Are we going to argue that God somehow inspired his mental illness?
I suspect a disproportionately high number of creative individuals are gay. Think ballet. Are we going to argue that God creates gays so that certain artistic endeavors can be progress and thrive.
I prefer to think that God is not stirring pots. Randomly inspiring certain individuals. Each individual has it within themselves to be exceptionally creative. An individual’s accomplishments are his own. Think free agency.
A quick clarification: I’m not saying we need to decide what part of someone’s work is inspired and what is not. We just need to decide what’s good and what’s not, and we do that all the time. If you don’t like Thomas Jefferson’s writings, Van Gogh’s art, or Van Wagenen’s endowment film, fine. If you do, I’m suggesting you can go ahead and enjoy/learn from/be inspired by them, knowing God will judge their creators for everything else they did in their lives–and has forbidden you from doing so. (In Van Gogh’s case, I trust his mental illness will make that judgment merciful.)
I’ll grant this is less complex when the flawed artist is safely dead.
I’m not sure all this philosophizing helps me appreciate McNaughton’s LDS artwork any more, or look past what feels like the symbolic wink and nod, the subtle dog whistle, of continuing to promote and endorse his otherwise uncontroversial works.