Profoundly Christian

Joseph Shaw on two performances of Modernist Christian art: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio

In December I was privileged to see performed two great works of Christian culture, both earning standing ovations. One was the recital, by the veteran actor Ralph Fiennes (familiar to some as ‘M’ in the most recent James Bond films), of T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, the poem series, Four Quartets. The other was the UK premier of a new composition, Christmas Oratorio, by the Catholic composer Sir James MacMillan.

Four Quartets is the greatest achievement of the greatest modern poet of the English language. Eliot was a modernist poet, in the sense that most of his poetry does not rhyme and scan like that of Shakespeare or Coleridge. He was of course perfectly able to do old-fashioned poetry, and in one of the great ironies of literature, eventually made his widow a rich woman with his whimsical children’s poems about cats, set to music by Andrew Lloyd-Webber. But as he explains in Four Quartets, he felt he could not express himself adequately within the limitations of the old conventions. After a bombastic passage, he tells us:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.

One way of understanding the problem, the impetus for art always to break out of old conventions and to develop new forms, is the need to maintain the effect on the audience of doing something a little unexpected. Thus, Shakespeare made his own the quite new convention of the iambic pentameter. In the late plays he broke the rules to convey (for example) in an extraordinarily vivid way, the growing madness of the jealous King Leontes in A Winter’s Tale. To have the same effect, later writers would have to break the rule even more, but do this too much and the expectations created by the rules disappear: it would no longer sound mad. In this sense the old forms are ‘worn out’. Eliot comments:

…every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it.

Modernism in art can mean the antitraditionalism of avant-garde artists who want to shock us simply to get attention, or wish to subvert, ridicule, and destroy artistic forms which have been used in the past to express values they reject. What Eliot does is, rather, to develop the poetic tradition, and his work is characterised both by economy of effort and the establishment of new forms and conventions. Modern poetry, not all of it bad, is deeply indebted to what Eliot was doing a hundred years ago. Eliot’s new paradigm has stood the test of time.

Four Quartets is, indeed, a profoundly Christian poem. Eliot perceived the problem of modernity—as expressed in The Wasteland—and came to accept not just Christianity, but the traditionalism of High Anglicanism. Some of his modernist artist friends were appalled to read these lines, which refer to Jesus Christ:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

It was pretty amazing to hear them spoken by one of our leading actors, the Catholic (I believe) Ralph Fiennes, in a small but fashionable London theatre. Fiennes was brilliant and accompanied by all the subtle effects of lighting and stagecraft.

The poems are about time and memory and set (and written) in part during the London Blitz. Eliot makes an extraordinary analogy between the bombs which brought destruction to the city, and the Holy Ghost:

T.S. Eliot in a photograph taken by his friend Lady Ottoline Morrell. The Christian message of Eliot’s Four Quartets is profound

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

For all the brilliance of Fiennes’ performance, however, I detected a certain embarrassment about the Christian nature of the work. The programme did not deny it, but placed the focus elsewhere: for instance, on Eliot’s interest in Eastern mysticism, which he studied at university.

Again, there was something a little strange about the way Fiennes recited the two most explicitly Christian passages, of which I have quoted parts above. The first he spoke sitting, in front of an old fashioned microphone, as if making a radio broadcast, with his voice oddly amplified. The second he spoke woodenly, standing to attention on the edge of the stage. I wondered if the suggestion was that these passages were meant for show, that they were not the authentic, core message of the work.

No such ambiguity was to be found with Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, commissioned and performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the South Bank. The Oratorio sets to music passages of Milton, the recusant Catholic poet St Robert Southwell, a Scottish lullaby, the Preface of St John’s Gospel, and Latin liturgical texts.

Like Eliot, MacMillan seeks to express a traditional Christian faith—he is, indeed, a Patron of the Latin Mass Society— through art which is ‘modernist’ in terms of its style. Like Eliot he understands and makes use of traditional forms, but also goes beyond them, and breathes new life into them, with modern forms and conventions: in Eliot’s words, ‘an easy commerce of the old and the new’.

I do not have the technical knowledge or vocabulary to express exactly what MacMillan does and how, but his mastery of modern techniques is undisputed. These can be used to express a hatred for traditional music and for the values that music so often expressed, but musical forms are a language, and can be used to say other things as well. Nevertheless, there is a problem: modern composers, like modern architects, often seem to struggle with beauty, either because they associate it with sentimental art or ‘old hat’ styles, or because they reject the values which lie behind beauty: because they think that, ultimately, the world is ugly, and to deny this as an artist is to tell a lie.

This problem is made worse by the Church’s use of bad art. By this I do not mean popular or genuine folk art, but sentimental or incompetent art. Since art is the expression of values, sentimental religious and devotional art expresses a sentimental spirituality: an emotionally manipulative, and ultimately abusive, spirituality. Incompetent art, art which revels in incompetence and makes a virtue of it, expresses a religious attitude of contempt for spiritual things.

It is MacMillan’s achievement to show that music can be beautiful and at the same time have artistic integrity: it can be fine, intelligent, serious, profound. By operating at the sweet spot of artistic endeavour— without straying into the predictable on one side, or the incomprehensible on the other—MacMillan gives this message the greatest possible power for today’s critics and audiences. He makes the message of the art, the Christian message, luminous, attractive, and accessible to those who might otherwise think that it is artistically inauthentic and, by implication, morally and spiritually inauthentic and mendacious.

These great artistic achievements, of MacMillan and of T.S. Eliot, demonstrate that the Christian message is still inspiring the greatest artists and performers of our time, and can move our largely pagan contemporaries profoundly. As a cultural force, Christianity still has life in it.

Sir James MacMillan: his Christmas Oratorio expresses a traditional Christian faith through art which is modernist in terms of its style