Good Art, Bad Art, Faith and Doubt 4 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

As America magazine’s June 23-30 issue pointed out, it was extraordinary to find the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue (June 9 & 16) devoted so prominently to God, including a series of short reflections collectively entitled “Faith and Doubt.”

Predictably, given its fundamental skepticism about religious matters, the New Yorker wouldn’t be able to conceive of “Faith” without “Doubt” clutching its hand. Not that doubt isn’t a key movement within the faith of believers in the Jewish-Christian-Muslim tradition; it surely is. “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.”

But as this line from Mark 9:24 indicates, believers’ doubt resides within a grounding of faith, or at least within an assumption that there exists a God with whom we can dialogue—even when our part of the dialogue might be shouting at God in frustration, anger, or near despair. (“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me”—Psalm 22.)

This is just to say that for believers, faith and doubt are not of equal weight and consistency, whereas for this particular New Yorker issue they are. Still, this little “Faith and Doubt” series is a hopeful sign; generally the New Yorker has given credence (so to speak) only to Doubt, leaving Faith aside as not worthy of serious attention.

All the pieces in this “Faith and Doubt” series do give faith its fair and equal weight along with doubt. But the piece I want to mull over for this post is the lovely reflection by fiction writer and memoirist Tobias Wolff. I choose it because it’s particularly apt for the Image community, since it’s all about the role of art in bringing people to faith—or in turning them away from it. Wolff is now, in mature adulthood, a Christian believer, but he wasn’t always so; and his reflection, called “Winter Light,” focuses on a key moment during his youthful aggressively agnostic days.

The episode Wolff recounts is of his going with a college classmate one evening to see Bergman’s film Winter Light, which happened to be screening free of charge in a local church. The film’s unflinching honesty about finding love and faith in the midst of the bleakest despair immediately silenced the young Wolff’s scoffingly agnostic heart. “It is a harrowing experience, this film.... When the movie ended, we all sat there as if stunned. I used the word ‘harrowing.’ Truly I felt harrowed, crust broken, buried things churning to the surface.”

Bergman’s artistry had stirred in Wolff the beginnings of genuine religious experience: the kind of questioning of life’s bleakness that longs for an answer, longs for a light adequate to shine into the dread darkness of the human condition.

But then the church’s minister—with another work of art—instantly slammed a lid on Wolff’s inner stirrings. With words along the lines of “just come to Jesus,” the minister projected onto the screen a print of William Holman Hunt’s painting “The Light of the World.” Wolff’s response was disgust and even a sense of betrayal. “Because I really disliked that painting. It seemed to me a typical Pre-Raphaelite production: garish, melodramatic, cloying in its technique and sentimentality.”

Wolff fled that church, his tender new religious stirrings smothered by the painting’s “pretentious humbug.” Only years later was he drawn back toward “the possibility of faith.” And this time it was again great art that drew him: not film now but poetry—Herbert, Hopkins, Eliot.

But to his credit, in “Winter Light” Wolff doesn’t leave the narrative with this simple moral: that great art draws the agnostic toward religious faith, while kitsch only turns him off. Wolff’s college classmate, who entered the church that evening sharing Wolff’s scorn of religion, was unexpectedly transformed by the Holman Hunt painting. “That night—to some extent, that picture—changed his life. He enrolled in Bible classes at the church, and went on to become a missionary in Africa.”

Faith and Doubt; good art and bad art. Wolff leaves us pondering the various permutations of these pairings. We readers of Image and Good Letters might want to simplify the linkage, and match only good art with “true” faith. Or maybe I’d better just speak for myself: I believe that good art has a privileged relation to faith. Yet we must admit that in our popular culture plenty of bad art stirs people to genuinely good religious faith, a faith that issues in loving actions and a Christ-like spirit. That’s the disquieting truth that Wolff, by including his classmate’s conversion experience, is bold enough to enfold into his “Winter Light.”