Christian works of art by unbelieving artists?

In the village of Llanystumdwy near Pwllheli on the Llyn peninsula in North Wales, a village perhaps best known for its associations with David Lloyd George, is a small chapel, dating from the 1930s, and home to a congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Wales. It is a building of almost perfect proportions, light and airy, with beautifully made contemporary fittings, a homely place of quiet spirituality. It feels as if it would be a good place to worship in, one where the building and its furnishings aid rather than hinder worship.

Capel Llanystumdwy was designed by the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, who executed a number of commissions around the village, but who is best known for that remarkable Italianate fantasy village of Portmeirion a few miles to the east. And there is its oddness, since this lovely, balanced and spiritual building was designed not by a Christian architect, well-versed in the art of liturgy and worship, but by a man who all his life described himself as an unbeliever, and who was buried at his request with a humanist funeral service. Contrast his example with the great Victorian architect, William Butterfield, who always made his Confession and received the Sacrament before designing a Church.

Clough Williams-Ellis is not alone in being a man of no faith or unorthodox faith having produced a work of art which speaks of spirituality, of "the Other", and which has been a rich resource for people of faith - the 19^th century French composer Gabriel Fauré, whose setting of the Requiem Mass has been the vehicle of worship for so many, was agnostic for most of his life. This month we mark the half-centenary of the death of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams whose hymn tunes, Mass settings and sacred music continue to touch the hearts of many: yet, although he was a child of a Vicarage, Vaughan Williams confessed to agnosticism all his adult life.

Can an unbeliever produce a work of spirituality, especially a work rich in Christian symbolism and allusion ? Clearly the answer in "yes" in practical terms, as the examples above testify, but there would be those who might balk at commissioning "sacred" work from those at best wavering in belief and "at worst" apparently secular. There were those in the 1930s who were concerned about the commissioning of Clough Williams-Ellis for designing a place of worship, and there are those who would still be unhappy about receiving work from an artist or musician whose life and beliefs were not explicitly Christian. This is one of the themes of Peter Shaffer's engaging play and film about the "life" of Mozart, Amadeus, for the upright and devout composer Salieri cannot cope with the gift given to such an inappropriate wastrel as the young Mozart.

Yet, as C.S.Lewis used to say, "God has no sense of his own importance", and the examples I have quoted suggest that spirituality is not the exclusive preserve of the paid up believer. It is remarkable how the symbols and images of the Christian story continue to speak to and resonate with those who otherwise find themselves outside the story - this seems especially true of the Passion and the Cross (I recall a number of Francis Bacon studies of the Crucifixion for example. To be fair, there are examples of artists using Christian images in ways disturbing and offensive, and clearly designed to shock, but that says more about the psychology of the artist than anything else. Compared with those who genuinely and sensitively utilise Christian language and imagery, they are very few however. Moving away from pictorial art or design to the abstract, many have written of the order and symmetry of the work of Piet Mondrian or the glowing colours of the canvases of Mark Rothko as being "spiritual" works, meditation on which lead them into the presence of God, yet neither men were orthodox Christian believers.

I have long had a concern that our genuine and real proclamation of the uniqueness of what God has done in Jesus Christ can too easily be turned into a denial that God works outside the community of believers, or that he has left himself witnesses in the most unlikely places. Paul recognised that God moved beyond the community of faith when speaking to the council (the Areopagus) at Athens (Acts 17). He happily quoted the language of pagan poets and philosophers to speak of the Athenian sense of the true God (the "unknown God" to whom they had erected an altar), and used it as a basis for his proclamation of Christ. It is but a short step from using this awareness evangelistically, to welcoming and using it and benefiting from it ourselves, as so many have with the architecture of Clough Williams-Ellis in that little Welsh chapel, or with the music of Fauré or Vaughan Williams. The Christian faith and Gospel define the presence of God but they do not confine his working, and we are not in the business of limiting and making too narrow the love that he has poured out for us. The Church surely needs to welcome the arts (and thankfully often does) and recognise the presence and grace of God there.

Roger Clarke

October 2008