Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World
Begbie, Jeremy S. Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023. Pp. 272. $39.99.
It is no secret that in Christian universities today, the arts are under pressure. Facing the demographic cliff, the decline in the number of arts and humanities majors, and the push for slimmer degrees, Christian colleges are being tempted to throw the arts overboard in order to keep the ship afloat. To resist this temptation, Christian institutions of higher education need a robust theology of the arts. In Abundantly More, pianist and theologian Jeremy Begbie provides exactly what such institutions need: a theology of the arts that pushes back against today’s reductionist pressures. Begbie argues for two main claims: that the arts resist reductionism (the belief that X is “nothing more than” Y), and that this resistance is theology significant. Central to Begbie’s argument is a contrast between the containment of reductionism and the uncontainability of both God and the arts.
In his opening chapter, Begbie outlines four pressures of today’s most prevalent form of reductionism: naturalistic reductionism (NR). NR holds that only physical reality exists, and that all of reality can be explained through the natural sciences, especially physics. Such a worldview exercises a pressure toward ontological singularity, toward exclusionary simplicity, toward the privileging of one epistemic stance (detached observer), and toward control and mastery. By ontological singularity, Begbie means the belief that there is one level of reality—in this case, the microphysical particle—that is more real than all the others and in terms of which all the others can be explained. This belief is closely related to exclusionary simplicity, the bias against complicated explanations that do not fit within a preestablished worldview. It is Occam’s Razor gone wild, or, as Begbie puts it, “simplicity in a hurry” (20). NR also exerts an epistemic pressure toward a detached, objective stance that privileges one kind of discourse as the most true: the literal, unambiguous, third-person assertion. These three pressures are themselves driven by the pressure toward control and mastery. C.S. Lewis summarizes this meta-pressure in a famous passage from The Abolition of Man: “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”[i] In short, reductionist modernity seeks to “make the world engineerable (21).”[ii]
It is not difficult to see how such pressures could affect the arts. If the most real things are those studied by the natural sciences, then those disciplines will be considered more valuable than disciplines like the arts that study “less real” things. In Begbie’s words, “corresponding to a hierarchical vision of physical reality is a hierarchy of disciplines” (14). With respect to exclusionary simplicity, a culture impatient with complexity will be frustrated by art’s nuance and inefficiency. Art also relies on the kind of first-person attachment that NR presents as an obstacle to knowledge, and speaks in language other than the preferred literal, third-person assertion—if it uses words at all. According to NR, the arts are at best entertaining, at worst deceptive, and in no sense true. Finally, although the arts can be useful, their primary purpose is not control or mastery, nor are they especially helpful in accomplishing utilitarian, practical ends. As Michael Bérubé has put it, “No infusion of Jane Austen will send stomach cancer into remission.”[iii]
If Christian colleges are to value the arts, it must be on the basis of an understanding of reality different from the one NR offers. After showing how reductionism puts pressure on the arts in chapter 2, Begbie proceeds to critique NR. In chapter 4, he shows how NR leads to positions that are self-refuting or odd. Readers familiar with critiques of naturalism will likely recognize some of Begbie’s arguments (e.g., that if NR is true, all truth-claims are reducible to brain states, including the claim that NR is true). The most unusual feature of Begbie’s arguments is that they are sandwiched between two, brief “Scriptural interruptions” (chs. 3 and 5). In each of these chapters, Begbie reflects on a passage from the gospel of John that exerts a counterpressure against a reductionist worldview. According to Begbie, the literary character of John’s gospel is theologically significant: devices like metaphor, allusion, and irony show that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
After the second Scriptural interruption, Begbie shifts to a positive account of how the arts and theology offer counterpressures to reductionism. In chapter 6, Begbie argues that the arts help us see aspects of ordinary reality than we often overlook, a process known as defamiliarization. As one literary critic has put it, “art exists…in order to make a stone stony.”[iv] Although defamiliarization will be a familiar term to some, Begbie’s argument is insightful because it shows how this process is an implicit argument against reductionism: defamiliarization implies that there are depths to ordinary reality than we do not typically see and that cannot be accounted for in a reductionist worldview. Art counters reductionism by helping us wade into these depths.
Begbie’s next move is more insightful still—and offers much-needed ammunition to the embattled arts. According to Begbie, defamiliarization functions like metaphor insofar as it involves the generative combination of apparently dissimilar things—in this case, the artistic subject and the artistic medium. For example, even if a poem deals with an ordinary subject (say, the coming of spring), the treatment of this subject in poetry requires the bending of language into an extraordinary shape (e.g., we don’t typically speak in iambic pentameter). In bending language like this, the poem can help us see the subject in a new light. Having argued that art is metaphorical in character, Begbie is able to apply to the arts recent research about the cognitive power of metaphor. This research argues that metaphors are not simply window-dressing; they are a way of understanding reality. Thus, “[t]he arts must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the broadest sense of advancement of the understanding.”[v] This point is key for Christian colleges: if the arts are a way of knowing no less significant than the sciences, they deserve a significant place in a well-rounded university education.
In chapters 7-8, Begbie shows how theology offers its own pushback against reductionism. Rather than positing ontological singularity, the Christian faith affirms the existence of realities besides (and as important as) the physical. The diversity of creation reflects the diversity of God’s triune life. Because God is unfathomable, reality cannot be explained with exclusionary simplicity. As the revelation of an unfathomable God, and as a participant in his eschatological purposes, creation is always more than it appears to be. Furthermore, because Jesus’ knowledge of the Father is the paradigm for human knowledge, the ideal epistemic stance is not of one detachment but one of love. Because God is triune, “the personal ontologically precedes the impersonal” (180), and this ontology should be reflected in our epistemology. Thus, rather than privileging the literal, third-person assertion, we should see a variety of modes of discourse as truth-bearing, just as we see a variety of modes of discourse in the Scriptures. Finally, a Christian vision of reality counters our desire for control and mastery with the self-giving love of Christ, which is ours through the Holy Spirit.
Chapter 9 brings together the preceding chapters, showing how the uncontainable pressures of the arts and of God are mutually informing, and how both together resist the four reductive pressures outlined in the opening chapter. The book then concludes in chapter 10 with a brief meditation on Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus.
Although Abundantly More is, on the whole, a sound and insightful work, it suffers from two closely related weaknesses. First, in its key contrast between containment and uncontainability, it tends to portray uncontainability as an unqualified good and containment as an unqualified evil. For example, at the beginning of chapter 7, Begbie makes the following claim: “just as reductionism is dominated by pressures of containment—narrowing down, closing off, constricting—the Christian faith takes its energy from an opposite pressure, one that refuses bounded containment” (126). This passage is, ironically, reductive. Although the Christian faith certainly resists particular kinds of containment, it also presents certain kinds of containment as good. Perhaps the most obvious example is the way Scripture uses language that implies containment to describe deposits of authoritative teaching. Jude can speak of “the faith” as being “once for all delivered to the saints” (1:3), Ecclesiastes can compare “the collected sayings” to “nails firmly fixed” (12:11), and John can pronounce judgement against anyone who adds to “the words of the prophecy of this book” (Revelation 22:18). It seems to me that such examples of containment are analogous to God’s “oneness,” just as uncontainability is to his “threeness,” and that these two could have been more appropriately balanced.
Second, Begbie emphasizes creation, redemption, and consummation to the neglect of the fall. Although his Scriptural interruptions from John’s gospel are illuminating, one could just as easily write a Scriptural interruption on Genesis 4 and the invention of various arts by the descendants of Cain. There is, of course, a polemical reason why Begbie does not do this: he is arguing in defense of the arts. Nonetheless, further reflection on the dangers of the arts would have been helpful toward the end of creating not simply abundantly more, but abundantly better, art.
Despite its weaknesses, Abundantly More offers a theological vision for the arts that can help Christian colleges resist not only obvious pressures like declining enrollment but the more subtle, philosophical pressures of a reductionist worldview. Begbie shows that the arts are not simply “dessert” but a main course, a way of knowing both the world and its uncontainable creator.[vi]
[i] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperOne, 1944), 77.
[ii] Begbie is quoting Harmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Boston: Polity, 2020), viii.
[iii] Michael Bérubé, “The Utility of the Arts and Humanities,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 2.1 (2003): 25. Begbie quotes Bérubé on page 80.
[iv] Victor Shklovsky, “Art, as Device,” Poetics Today 36.3 (2015): 162. Translated by Aleandra Berlina. Begbie quotes Shklovsky on page 97.
[v] Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Harvester, 1978), 102. Begbie quotes Goodman on page 105.
[vi] Bérubé, “The Utility of the Arts and Humanities,” 25. Begbie quotes Bérubé on page 41.
RYAN SINNI
Assistant Professor of English | LeTourneau University