The Artist as Prophet 0 comments

AT the Image conference last November—a conference that addressed the theme “Beyond the Culture Wars”—one of the liveliest question-and-answer sessions took place after James Davison Hunter’s talk. Hunter, a sociologist who helped define the term “culture wars,” devoted much of his talk to the relationship between the artist and the larger community. He suggested that in order to avoid the conflicts that have often pitted the arts world against various sectors of the public, artists should develop a more profound sense of how they might serve the community.

Despite the fact that the majority of people in the audience were churchgoing folk (and thus predisposed to moral and communal concerns), many of those who asked questions after Hunter’s talk bristled at the idea that the artist should make his or her work serve the community and any standards the community might set up for acceptable art. This would constitute an intolerable infringement on artistic freedom, they argued, and would lead to art that was so sanitized as to be indistinguishable from propaganda. But there were also many in the audience who sympathized with Hunter’s call, noting that artists who have touted creative autonomy as the supreme value have in fact produced work that is pointless, degrading, and obscene—art that is harmful to the community.

Clearly, Hunter’s remarks prompted yet another round of an age-old debate, a controversy that the philosopher Jacques Maritain called the perennial struggle between Art and Prudence. From the anxieties of Plato’s philosopher kings to the latest congressional harrumphing about the National Endowment for the Arts, the conflict between the creative freedom of the artist and the public good has been vexing and divisive.

Image, being a journal of the arts and religion, would seem to have an uneasy foot in both camps. How do we approach such issues? One analogy that has helped us to put this conflict into perspective is that of seeing the artist as prophet.

Like the biblical prophet, the artist is often an outsider, one who stands apart and delivers a challenge to the community. The prophets of old employed many of the same tricks used by writers and artists: lofty rhetoric, apocalyptic imagery, biting satire, lyrical evocations of better times, and subversive irony. To be sure, the true prophet came not to proclaim his own message, but that of the Lord.

Being a prophet was, and is, a hazardous occupation; the possibility of stoning is always present. Prophets have been called disturbers of the peace, revolutionaries, traitors, and babbling madmen. The Bible itself contains stories of many false prophets—charlatans who sought the prophetic mantle but who had no contact with God. But the Bible is also grounded in the truths found in those twin sources of inspiration known as “the law and the prophets.”

Flannery O’Connor, who often spoke of the “prophetic poet,” was delighted to discover in the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas a powerful defense of prophecy and its relationship to the imagination. Contrary to those who dismiss prophecy (and art) for being subjective, St. Thomas notes that prophecy “first and chiefly consists in knowledge, because prophets know things that are far removed from man’s knowledge.” While God delivers the message, St. Thomas says, the prophet’s mind must be elevated by imaginative readiness to receive and then transmit that message. The divine afflatus does not cancel out the human imagination, but raises it to visionary heights.

This passage from the Summa is the source from which O’Connor derived her description of the artist as “the realist of distances.” The artist and the prophet bring far things near; they somehow bring the urgencies of the eschatological realm into the mundane world of the here and now. That sudden shift in perspective can be disorienting and disturbing. At the same time it can be a deeply moral act. The strains of Puritanism and pragmatism that run deep in the American psyche have always lead to fear of art’s willingness to probe the “distances” that lie enshrouded in mystery and ambiguity. That is why school boards and political action committees routinely fail to see the difference between pornography and the writings of Toni Morrison, or between exploitative rubbish like Showgirls and serious films like Breaking the Waves.

To speak of the artist as a prophet is to confer praise. But it is important to remember that even in biblical times the prophet was not completely independent of the community. Prophets might have been more free to speak their minds than the average members of society, but they were not autonomous. The office of prophet was not the same as that of priest or king, and the prophet had no right to arrogate those roles to himself. Of course, that sort of aesthetic aggrandizement has been all too common in the modern era. Sadly, the defenders of the NEA—and the arts in general—cannot articulate an argument that moves beyond the idea of artistic autonomy.

The prophet and the artist may seek to disturb the existing order of things, but they should do so in the name of a deeper order, not in the name of their own genius. The artist will serve the community best not by worrying about either his own autonomy or the community’s immediate concerns but by remaining open to the transcendent sources of order. By keeping an eye fixed on the distances, the artist will do justice to both art and community.