The Artist as Co-Creator

J. R. R. Tolkien begins The
Silmarillion with Ilúvatar (the “Father of All”) engaged in the act of
creation. Creation unfolds according to the theme of the Great Music that Ilúvatar
inspires in each of the Ainur (“Holy Ones”) through the Imperishable Flame. For
Tolkien, God invites creatures to participate in the act of creation by
enflaming their creative passion and ordering it toward a particular end. The
Great Music has a theme that enters each of the Holy Ones and comes forth
through their own voice as it is enflamed with divine ardor.

Tolkien’s decision to describe the arc of creation as a hymn
is no doubt in part because of the influence of the seventh century peasant
poet Cædmon. Like the prophet Daniel, Cædmon received the nine-line hymn of
creation in a vision at night. As Tolkien scholars have noted, it was from Cædmon’s
hymn that Tolkien retrieved the term “Middle-earth,” which was the poet’s way
of describing the habitation God made for humanity.

More to the point for Tolkien, however, was the connection
between poetry and peasantry. With its fusion of creativity and charismatic
inspiration, it was a folk culture that gave birth to the first English
Christian poet. The nightly revelations and the spontaneous burst of hymnic
praise placed Cædmon in touch with cosmic harmonies that dwelled just beneath the
surface of things. On this wave of inspiration, Cædmon began to Christianize
the Old English poetic tradition in keeping with the Icelandic view of poetry as
the capacity to peer into the runes and find the meaning of the world.

Bubbling up from the cultural landscapes of everyday life,
the creativity behind poetry and music places the person in touch with another
world, the enchanted one hidden in plain sight. It is how the theme of the
Great Music continues to play in and through the particularities of life.

Yet, this music has a theme that the artist must discover. In
his Exhortation to the Greeks,
Clement of Alexandria invites readers to listen to the new song of “my
minstrel.” The minstrel turns out to be the “salutary Word” who harmonizes the
universe and the soul. As a microcosm of creation, the interior movements of
thoughts, emotions, and desires in the soul find their counterpart in the rhythms
of life. They must be brought back into order and harmony.

This is one reason why the church calendar remains an
important feature of Christian culture—it teaches Christians to conform their
lives to the rhythms of the macrocosm once again. The artist finds the theme in
the Word who stands behind the words and whose healing balm delivers from a
slavery to the creation that prevents the artist from fully seeing the world.
Desires conceal as much as they reveal.

As the minstrel of humanity, the Word turns humans into
seers once again in the same way that Cædmon, the herdsman became a visionary
who transformed a culture. Because the rational structure of the human mind
finds its source in divine rationality, this Word illuminates the eye of the
soul turning ordinary persons into prophets who can begin to read creation. The
Father has sown seeds of the Word into the fabric of human rationality, which,
when enkindled by the muse of the Spirit, causes persons to participate in the
praise of creation for its Creator.

The reason why symbolic modes of discourse are important is
because creation is a divine language whose symbolic meaning must be unlocked. It
always and ever retains its capacity to communicate—its analogia entis. Humans become co-creators as they peer into
creation and finds its meaning. This is the ancient and medieval idea of the
artist as an artifex who mimics
divine artistry by cultivating new art forms as the creation “speaks.”

One glimpses this at work in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which
are set in the spaces between nature and the folk cultures emerging in concert
with nature. With the epigraphs of Burnt Norton, Eliot reminds his readers that
the “Logos is common to all.” As the
beginning and the end, the Logos is
woven into Eliot’s symbolic discourse on open fields, dances around bonfires, rivers,
waterfalls, and other aspects of nature’s and culture’s delights. All of this
unfolds through the changing seasons. Elliot concludes,

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning

Eliot’s effort to read creation as God’s language, coupled
with his pronounced fear over human inhumanity creates a tension in the poems.
Instead of resolving the tension, Eliot pronounces the prophetic word of Julian
of Norwich, another seer of a different time, that “all shall be well.”

Tolkien and Eliot paint a picture of the artist as
co-creator with God whose Word indwells creation and the structure of human
rationality. The transformation of culture occurs at the level of the folk, the
hoi polloi, who open themselves up to
visions and dreams at night.

While scientists may unlock some secrets of nature,
scientific discourse falls short of her teleology. For that, even the
experience of a herdsman (or a hobbit), when filled with the Spirit, will due. In and through
these encounters with God, artists discover the symbolic modes of discourse—whether
poetry, music, pottery, architecture, or otherwise—to express the language of
creation as they peer through the East Cokers of this world and find that “in my end is my beginning.”