A far stronger contender is our desire, our drive to Create.

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One of the early examples of Divine Qualities in Hebrew Scriptures is to be found in the act of God in creating – “In the beginning God created …”. And throughout Scripture, God is the One who Brings into Being that which had not been; who takes Nothing and from it makes Something; who imbues what Is with the capacity to Become.

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Being the Creator, both describes and defines God. As such it is an essential part of God-likeness. And it is a divine characteristic which humanity shares.

 

As far as we can tell, human beings are the most inventive and creative species on the planet. Technically, this is largely due to our opposable thumbs, our larger brains and, eventually, our language.

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15,000,000 years ago, there were ape-like creatures living in Africa and Central Europe. Given time, they would become us. They had come down from the trees and were getting about on two legs. Like most other animals, they fashioned habitats for themselves.

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But 3,400,000 years ago, one of them did something quite different. S/he butchered an animal with a stone knife. Archaeologists didn’t find the knife, but they found animal bones with the marks of knife cuts. Someone had seen a stone fragment and recognised its potential. They modified it, and found a new use for it. They had invented a blade.

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That imaginative leap, with the passing of millennia, led to space travel, to open-heart surgery, to artificial intelligence and beyond. And we quickly filled the world with things which we made.

 

Long after that early knife was put to use, a different kind of thing came into the world.

45,000 years ago, on a cave wall in Sulawesi, someone painted a pig.

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No doubt over generations – it cannot have been a ‘first’ - that community had acquired the skills to create marks on a surface which put people in mind of a pig. People saw those marks ‘as’ something they encountered outside the cave.

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We can only speculate why they did it. Magic and mystical experience seem likely. Seeking control over the real-life animals is a possibility. But there is far more here, within the image itself. Thousands of years later, we might have said “This looks like a pig”, but only because we are so familiar with images. The original viewers had a far better understanding of what they saw. They would have said “This is a pig”.

Their community had found a way of re-creating their world. They had created Art.

 

Here was/is a product of this God-like urge to create, which in itself stands apart from all other creations. At its heart, Art does not set out to decorate or illustrate (although it might happen to do both) or even to imitate. It does not represent, it re-presents. Art does not exist to point to the world around us, The purpose of Art is to show us Truth.

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Appearance is deceptive, or at best illusory. If Art simply dealt with the appearance of things it would share in that illusion. But Art strives to show us the nature of things, the truth of things, a reality which goes beyond mere appearance.

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Art does this in all its various forms.

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Before we began to paint on the walls of caves, we were making three-dimensional objects. We began to sculpt. And our first sculptures seemed themselves to be god-like beings: small statues which could be carried from place to place. No doubt they stood as replicas of divinities; something which could be prayed to or pleaded with. But did they signify something far more potent? The presence of the deity, perhaps? Put this statuette in your dwelling, and the god was suddenly ‘there’? This would make sense. Sculptures could only be prayed to, if they had already brought the deity into the room; if the deity inhabited the sculpture.

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But neither painting nor sculpting were our first artistic expression. Some 20,000 years before the Sulawesi pig, somebody carved a flute out of the thigh bone of a bear. It is a true musical instrument, with four surviving note holes. Modern reconstructions have shown that it is designed to play notes (rather than simply make a noise) which pre-supposes the existence of Music. We have no way of knowing what Music was played on this instrument. What it might have been ‘about’? What was it ‘for’? There are natural sounds which an instrument might imitate – birdsong for instance – but in principle Music doesn’t imitate anything; it refers to nothing but itself. In our imagination, we might associate Music with images or actions. Contemporary audiences will forever associate the Adagio from Khachaturian’s Spartacus with sailing ships after the BBC’s Onedin Line; Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries with helicopter warfare after Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. But the Music itself has nothing to do with those dramatic imaginings. It is simply, and majestically, Music.

 

 

And here lies a clue to another astonishing thing about Art. It refers to great themes such as Meaning and Truth – realities which exist on a different level and in quite a different way to the materials of painting and sculpture – but it does so by only pointing to itself. What Art refers to is embodied in itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now we are treading on Holy Ground.

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One of the insights of Christianity is the principle of Incarnation: the understanding that God not only Creates, but also inhabits Creation.

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It does not mean that Creation becomes God, nor that God and Creation are the same. It does not imply that God ‘puts on’ Creation, as someone might put on a suit of clothes. Instead, to speak of God as Incarnate in Creation calls to mind the wine which mixes with water in the Chalice.  Distinct, but essentially inseparable.

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The supreme paradigm of this is Jesus of Nazareth. When one met with the person of Jesus, one was meeting a Human Being but not one who was an Example of God, nor one who was an Illustration of God, nor yet one who was a Copy or Replica of God.

 

It was a meeting with God.

 

This is not entirely unlike our experience of Art.

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Art will always in some way embody the Artist. At the same time, it will always have the capacity to embody Goodness, Truth and Beauty. Without that, it ceases to be Art and becomes something else – illustration, decoration and so on. There are equivalents between this way of looking at Art, and in the way we have come to understand the Nature of God.

 

Does that surprise us? When Art arises out of Humanity’s God-likeness?

 

God is not like us, but – in some ways – we are like God.

Out of our God-likeness we are driven to Create. Part of what we create is Art, which embodies qualities which point back to God.

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When we celebrate Art, we celebrate our God-likeness, and increase the stock of Goodness, Truth and Beauty in the world.

 

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