What writers from our century will endure? Surely the poets T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden will make the list, both informed by Christian sensibility. Solzhenitsyn no doubt will, albeit more for the raw force of his words than for their craft. Perhaps J. R. R. Tolkien will also be read a century from now, his invention of another world still shedding light on this one.

One of those artists, T. S. Eliot, makes an interesting study. Faced with the political crises of communism and nazism, for twenty years he wrote little poetry, concerning himself instead with more “urgent” matters such as politics, economics, and pragmatic schemes to improve society. In such works as Idea of a Christian Society, After Strange Gods, and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, he turned away from firmly embedded nails and toward goads. Yet who reads those works today? Eliot’s poetry easily outlasted his well-intentioned ideas. Can we learn a lesson from Eliot? Perhaps the best way to achieve the values we approve is not to talk about them all the time, or to try and legislate them, but rather to create literature and art in which they are placed as firmly embedded nails.

Philip Yancey, "The Writer as Artist"

From Jeanne Murray Walker's essay "On Poets and Poetry":

I would add another category of bad poems: those that are not marked by a struggle with the medium of language. They are English gussied up to look like poetry. Some such poems are written in order to argue some dogma: Marxism, Christianity, the superiority of a breath freshener. There is poetry and then there is dogma. Both have their place. But they have very different personalities. If I start a poem with dogma rather than a metaphor, say, or a dramatic voice, it usually goes bad, even if I try to fix it using a lot of metaphor. I don't mean that any poem with an idea in it is bad. Not at all. I mean that a poem seems to include its own fossil record of how it was conceived. I find that I can't cheat on this score. If I start with an idea, if I don't have to struggle to get there, the poem is likely to sound idea-driven and polemical. . . .  

Then what is the relationship between poetry and truth? I think the point of all the arts, including poetry, is to tell the truth about what it is to be human. . . .  

. . . It's wrong to read a poem as if it were a list of propositions. And it's wrong to ask poetry to supply us with such a list, since poetry, like other arts, represents rather than argues. Beyond this, I am very skeptical toward anyone who tells me that he knows some piece of art or another doesn't conform to the truth and therefore should be banished. Human experience is very broad, and truth is wider than the universe. . . .  

. . . The ultimate purpose of our creation is to know and love God, but there are a practically infinite number of interesting things going on in the universe, and it seems to me that they are all fair game for writers. I believe that the art for art's sake movement, for example, which led to confessional poetry, is heartbreakingly and awfully mistaken. Art is wonderful, but it cannot save us and it cannot be the whole point. And yet I do not believe that the point of art is to spread the gospel either. Take a look at the variety of what God has created: giraffes, hedgehogs, the dawn, the mind-boggling world of a cell, the Milky Way. He is not didactic. He has a sense of humor. And He must be fascinated by His whole creation.

"Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person who is a Christian. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of self-conscious evangelism."


Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

As Gene Edward Veith has said in The Gift of Art, "Beauty is an appropriate end in itself--the garments [for the tabernacle] were to be made for beauty. The inventor of color, of form, of texture, the author of all natural beauties, values the aesthetic dimension for its own sake. According to the clear statements of Scripture, art has its place in the will of God." . . .

The tragedy is that so many Christians, in their revulsion at the perverse aspects of such art, shun all art, even that which may spring from a God-honoring imagination. . . . The other "Christian" alternative is a conservatism that responds only to kitsch, a sentimental art of the Hallmark greeting card variety that cheapens true sentiment, turning it into sweetness and light or mere moralistic propaganda--no teeth, no guts, no muscle, no reality. No real Christianity, either, if we consider the Creator's work as our powerful, radical model.

Luci Shaw, "Beauty and the Creative Impulse"

By the words "Christian Art" I do not mean Church art. . . . I mean . . . the art of redeemed humanity. It is planted in the Christian soul, by the side of the running waters, under the sky of the theological virtues, amidst the breezes of the seven gifts of the Spirit. It is natural that it should bear fruit.

Everything belongs to it, the sacred as well as the profane. It is at home wherever the ingenuity and the joy of man extend. Symphony or ballet, film or novel, landscape or still-life, puppet-show libretto or opera, it can just as well appear in any of these as in the stained-glass windows and statues of the churches.

. . . It is difficult, doubly difficult--four-fold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian. . . .

If you want to make a Christian [artwork], then be Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to "make Christian."

Do not make the absurd attempt to dissociate in yourself the artist and the Christian. They are one, if you are truly Christian, and if your art is not isolated from your soul by some system of aesthetics. . . .

Do not separate your art from your faith. But leave distinct what is distinct. Do not try to blend by force what life unites so well. If you were to make of your aesthetic an article of faith, you would spoil your faith. If you were to make of your devotion a rule of artistic activity, or if you were to turn desire to edify into a method of your art, you would spoil your art.

Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism