Christian Aesthetics

The Christian Aesthetic Essay: BSed

A Christian, when faced with the challenge of writing, finds himself in a dilemma: how is he to complete the task? Should he create an allegory? Should he try to teach a lesson reflecting God’s glory? Or should he follow secular trends and current desires in literature? To this, many Christians would say, “Certainly not!” Dorothy L. Sayers and Flannery O’Connor both aim to answer the first question of any Christian writer: How do I write a story with my beliefs?

2 Corinthians 3:18 states, “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” God transforms Christians into His likeness. Genesis 1:27 reveals that, in the Garden, we were completely in His likeness: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” To the artist, in the image of God means something different than what is often taught in Sunday schools. According to Sayers, “Is it his immortal soul, his rationality, his self-consciousness, his free will, or what, that gives him a claim to this rather startling distinction? . . . Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the ‘image’ of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, ‘God created’. The characteristic common to God and man is that: the desire and the ability to make things” (Sayers 17). The artist, like God, creates something out of nothing. But, there is an important distinction between something beautiful and poetic and something shoddy and cheap.

The artist’s purpose, in the simplest ...

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...y for the lunatic fringes of my own religion” (“'Harry Potter' Author J.K. Rowling Opens Up About Books' Christian Imagery”).

In my own writing, I find that my beliefs on humanity and God bleed into my words. My symbolism is not always intentional. I have started to believe that just by writing, I will complete the task of putting my views into the world. I believe that man is evil, and that is reflected in each character I create and his imperfection. Man can also be redeemed, visible in the hero’s fall from grace and return in triumph. Finally, man will be judged for his actions, shown by the consequences in each action that cause the plot to unfold. Overall, my beliefs, as O’Connor and Sayers state, intertwine into my work unintentionally as I write it. I do not have to force my reader to read Christian paradigm in order to get a Christian viewpoint into my work.