The Aesthetics of Simplicity

Protestantism seems an unlikely place to explore questions of the relation between aesthetics, religion, and literature. “In France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the British Isles,” states the Encylopedia of Protestantism, “the iconoclastic legacy of the Reformed tradition would cause widespread damage and, in many places, erase much of the artistic heritage of medieval Catholicism.” ¹ John McIntyre has accused Protestantism of “Iconophobia” and R. S. Thomas has bluntly accused the religious movement of being “the adroit castrator of art.” ² More recently, scholarship on aesthetics and religion has challenged this picture of Reformed Christianity. William A. Dyrness outlines a “Protestant imagination” that celebrates, among other things, a love for divine creation in landscape painting and expresses in portraiture the move to self-scrutiny; and Belden C. Lane presents a “surprising legacy” of Reformed theologians’ celebration of natural beauty, revealing that they “perceived the art of creation, God’s own aesthetic work in nature, as a pure and reliable witness to God’s stunning beauty.” ³ These new narratives of Reformed Christianity present a resurgence of interest in the role played by aesthetics. Yet the fact that the positive legacy of aesthetics is identified as “surprising” demonstrates the tenacity of the anti-aesthetic narrative. Aware, perhaps, of the need to understand this narrative better, some critics have sought to examine the shifts in aesthetic value that took place at the Reformation. Gregory S. Jackson, for instance, has traced in American Protestant culture “ancient embedded visual traditions of Protestant hermeneutics and homiletic practices.” ⁴ And Trevor Hart has argued that: “Where one branch of artistic opportunity was pruned … others quickly sprouted and grew,” citing as one example the burgeoning of woodcuts for Bibles, prayer books and broadsheets in early modern Europe. For Hart, the Reformation did not see an end of artistic appreciation but instead a “reorienting and refocusing of the artistic ‘gaze.’” ⁵