This sermon, on beauty, was preached by Christopher Herbert on 25 May 2014 as part of St Paul’s Cathedral’s sermon series ‘What I Want to Say Now: Retired Bishops Speak Out’. Listening to it via YouTube more than eight years after it was preached, I was struck by its commitment to the appreciation of beauty as a means of apprehending as best human beings can something of the true mystery of God. Herbert criticises trenchantly the Church of England’s neglect of the patrimony of buildings, prayers, poetry, and hymnody it has been bequeathed. If anything, this has become more entrenched since 2014.
More optimistically, on the other hand, I think there are possibilities of the image-oriented Instagram generation rediscovering the joys in ‘reading’ a Church and its contents in a way that probably hasn’t been true since the Reformation, which Herbert inevitably misses and few in the Church have yet noticed.
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A couple of months ago, a book was published by Edinburgh University Press. It’s entitled A Companion to the Bible and the Arts, and in it is an essay by Nicholas Bielby, and that essay has not left me alone. It’s actually about the subtleties and difficulties of biblical translation, and in it almost as a throwaway line he writes this:
If beauty is an attribute of God and His Word, then we should hope for intimations of it in the translation of His Word. This beauty is in the story the Bible tells us and we would hope to find it in the way it is told.
His essay is a delight, and thought it focuses on biblical translation, it ranges more widely into the whole field of aesthetics, and I want to quote him again:
An aesthetic experience has this sense of rediscovery of something unknown, but entirely familiar, because it feels right, and true, and beautiful.
You won’t be surprised to know that he doesn’t overload the word ‘feeling’. Because something feels right, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is.
Well, I’ve read and reread that essay with great enjoyment, partly because it is so carefully written, but also because it raises an issue to which I believe we need to give serious attention, and that is the whole question of beauty.
Now, I know that this series of sermons is supposed to be about bishops being unleashed, and speaking out in ways that we weren’t able to do when we were in office. And the hypothesis lying behind this series is now that we can now be free, and unconstrained, and can let rip.
Well, actually, I can honestly say when I was a diocesan bishop, I didn’t feel too constrained. For example, I felt able in the House of Bishops, which is a regular gathering of us prelates, because of the grace and generosity of heart of both George Carey and Rowan Williams to express dissent, to speak my mind, to try to say what I believed to be true. And, of course, my critiques, like all human statements were partial. No human being, least of all a bishop, can claim omniscience.
Nor did I feel too constrained in General Synod, nor in my own diocesan synod, though I do recall both disappointment and anger about the shenanigans that went on in both the Lambeth Conferences that I attended, and I said so.
Last week, here at St Paul’s, Bishop Tom Butler outlined what some of the issues at those conferences were, so I don’t need to spell them out anymore. His criticisms and his solutions were and are superb.
So, what did I not speak out about then which I can do now?
Thinking about it, the main issue I failed to address head on was the question of beauty.
Please bear with me, because when I talk about beauty, I’m not talking about the overly self-conscious and preening opinions of art critics. They write for a very limited audience.
The kind of beauty I want to take about is much larger and much more profound than that.
When I refer to beauty, I am referring to the absolute ineffable ultimately inexpressible beauty of the divine, of God, of the Almighty.
There is a delicious and troubling irony here. Going to churches throughout Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire as I did, gazing out from our house across to St Alban’s Abbey as I did, I’m afraid that I didn’t often reflect on the stunning loveliness of our church buildings. I loved them. I worked in them. I preached in them. But I didn’t actually consider the relationship between the beauty of those buildings and the beauty of God.
But let me not just confine myself to Herts and Beds. Think of any of the thousands of our churches throughout these islands. For example, the medieval glass in Fairford. The soaring Perpendicular of Patrington in Holderness. The grace of St Mary, Redcliffe, in Bristol. The racy, provocative, carvings at Kilpeck in Herefordshire. The strange carvings on the font at Melbury Bubb – what a glorious name for a village that is. (And I think it ought to be offered to The Archers. The wonderful name for a rediscovered, lost, cousin of Walter Gabriel – Melbury Bubb.) And whilst still in Dorset, what about those windows, etched by Laurence Whistler, in the church at Moreton. Or more prosaically, the graffiti in Ashwell in Hertfordshire that speaks movingly of the plague, and also has a design for the old St Paul’s.
The fact of the matter is that thousands and thousands of our church buildings are lovely beyond the telling of it.
That beauty isn’t there by chance. Each of them in its beauty tries to reflect something of the ineffable beauty of God.
And is if that weren’t enough of a heritage, think of the poetry of George Herbert – ‘Love bade me welcome’; or John Donne, in Sermon CXXVI, preached in 1627:
And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no cloud nor Sun, no darkness nor dazzling but one equal light, no noise nor silence but one equal music, no fears nor hopes but one equal possession, no foes nor friends but an equal communion and identity, no ends nor beginnings but one equal eternity.
Or more up to date, I could quote U A Fanthorpe. You may remember the lines that she put into the voice of St George:
I have diplomas in dragon management and virgin reclamation.
Wry and witty poetry, each word pulling its weight.
Or think of the beauty of English church music, of Tallis and Byrd and Purcell and Stanford and SS Wesley and Hubert Parry and Herbert Howells. I want Like as the Hart at my funeral.
Then think of the hymns which have enriched our worship, for example J M Neale’s translation of Venantius Fortunatus, thegreat 6th Century hymn, Sing My Tongue, the Glorious Battle.
The Church of England, and John Drury might say, is saturated in beauty in its hymns, its poetry, and its architecture, and I haven’t even mentioned the King James Version of the Bible, nor have I mentioned the Book of Common Prayer. Without being aware of it, the beauty of our buildings, our music, and our hymnody is embedded in the way we do our thinking and the way we express our theology.
At which point, I pause, because my rhetoric has begun to run away with me.
I’m not certain anymore that in the Church of England in the ways we talk of God, beauty has much of a place. When did you last hear a sermon, for example, whose content, delivery, or construction, you could honestly describe as beautiful? Surrounded as we are by buildings, textiles, hymns, poetry, and music of soaring beauty, our words about God have become drained, empty, and ploddingly banal.
And worse, look at some of our contemporary so-called ‘worship songs’. They make me cringe. They are so awful. And blasting them up with PowerPoint onto an overhead screen does nothing for my soul at all.
So what’s happened?
Well, I think it’s something to do with our apparent concern for linguistic truth. We are now in love with propositions. So we debate endlessly about issues to do with doctrine, or social affairs, or human sexuality. We are skilled at structuring arguments. We’re always, always, on transmit. We shout long and loud, through megaphones if necessary, and call the Church to mission.
We believe we have to gossip the Gospel to tell others what to think and how to think it.
Words are our currency, and we splash them around with prodigal abandon. We are word obsessives. And where does that come from.
Well, I suspect it comes directly from the Reformation and the invention of printing, when the visual gave way to words. So, as a result, over the centuries, beauty has been shoved to one side.
But it won’t do. It really won’t do.
The radiant, dark, mystery of God in Christ requires from us worship and thinking and expression, which somehow partake of the very beauty of God. We need worship and sermons and theology which are not flabbily prosaic, but we need them to have been created in language which has been crafted on a poetic anvil, hammered and cajoled into shape with the kind of joy and disciplined attention that John Donne and George Herbert brought to their work.
And all the evidence we have is that where beauty is actually given room to breathe, that is in the cathedrals and great parish churches of our land; in those places, where room is made for despair and doubt, where time is allowed for us to teeter on the edge of holiness; in those places where somehow the gracious and generous beauty of God is encountered in architectural space and music and poetry; there the reshaping of our innermost beings can and does take place.
Dominated, as our Church now is by words, we miss the truth that for most people that is beauty – beauty in nature, in music, in poetry, in art – which touches, redeems, and refreshes their souls. We stuff their ears with words, and don’t realise that their eyes are seeking truth elsewhere.
And what we are taking part in the Church of England, and helping to create, is a kind of tragedy – a withering – of the religious imagination. We’re no longer interested in what Keates referred to as ‘negative capability’, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. We’re not engaged with possibility. We’re no longer content in both knowing and unknowing. We’re no longer capable of learning to live in and with paradox, all the things that attention to beauty teaches us, which means that we concentrate more and more on hard propositional statements and then question anxiously why no one is listening.
So in this sermon series, centred on bishops speaking out, what is my message? It’s about reinstating beauty into our Christian formation, our theology, and our lives. For then we might well discover the common ground we share with our fellow human beings.
But even more important, is that we should rediscover the awesome, holy, beauty that is revealed within the very life of God Himself, and which by grace, and through Christ, He so prodigally and courteously shares with us.
O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; let the whole Earth stand in awe of Him.
Amen.
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I haven’t asked for permission before transcribing and sharing this, so if I have offended either the bishop or St Paul’s, I am sorry but I thought this was too good not to share.
Addendum: My thanks to Christopher Herbert for allowing me to share this sermon here.
