Creativity, the Arts, and Gifts as Service to God

Eliot on serving with body and spirit

Photo by Khara Woods on Unsplash

We’re nearing the end of our journey through T.S. Eliot’s long poem, “Choruses from The Rock” (see parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine). I suspect there will only be one more entry after this one to close us out. In today’s passage, I’m highlighting a stanza where Eliot poses a rhetorical question about gifts. The context, as always, is the building of the Temple, representing the Church. Of course it is ultimately Christ’s mission to build His Church, but we are called to do the work. And Eliot’s point is that sloth and indifference have taken over such that we no longer tend to the Church and her needs, and so She is decaying. This decay is both literal, with old churches falling into disrepair, and figurative, with churches straying from the Word. But in this passage the focus, as I said, is on the question of gift, gift and creation. How can we bring ourselves to the Church to help build Her up by offering them to God?

LORD, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service?
Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers
For life, for dignity, grace and order,
And intellectual pleasures of the senses?
The LORD who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service
Which is already His service in creating.
For Man is joined spirit and body,
And therefore must serve as spirit and body.
Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man;
Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple;
You must not deny the body.

What’s interesting about Eliot’s rhetorical question is the list of gifts he includes: “all our powers / For life, for dignity, grace and order, / And intellectual pleasures of the senses?” These aren’t, I suspect, the kinds of “gifts” we normally think of when we think of the gifts we can bring to the LORD for His service. Instead we’re likely to think of Romans 12:6-8:

⁶ Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; ⁷ if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; ⁸ the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

But Eliot’s list is quite different. Life. Dignity. Grace and order. And Intellectual pleasures of the senses. What are we to make of this? I suppose the best we can guess is that for his moment in history, Eliot felt that such gifts were the very things most needed by the Church. And I suppose they still are very critical to the health of the contemporary Church. Bringing the power of life into the Church is important in a time of declining birth rates and the promotion of abortion and euthanasia. The power of dignity in a time where nothing is solemn, nothing is sacred, and no one strives to be honorable. The power of grace and order create a harmony that prevents us from falling into antinomianism or legalism. We live by grace, but we also live orderly lives. This is especially important in a time where all spiritual laws are being flaunted.

And finally, and to Eliot most personally significant, the power of intellectual pleasures of the senses is important, by which he means poetry, the visual arts, literature, etc. But why? Unlike the other items, this one is not so self explanatory, and so he is going to have to elaborate on his logic.

Eliot goes on to write that “The LORD who created must wish us to create / And employ our creation again in His service / Which is already His service in creating.” In other words, the “power of intellectual pleasures of the senses” is important because it echoes God’s original creative work and is His will. God must desire us to be creative and use our creativity “in His service.” Even in the act of creating we are “already” in “His service,” before we ever share it with anyone. This does not make creative people more holy than anyone else, but it does mean that, in Eliot’s thinking, creative work is holy work when it is done in service to God.

It is also remarkable that Eliot frames the arts as “intellectual pleasures of the senses.” I suppose an entire post could be written about that formulation. First, great art (whether literature, visual arts, film, music, etc) is intellectual in nature if it is truly great art. If it only affects our emotions, then it is hollow art. There must be some intellectual stimulation. But the nature of that stimulation is primarily the experience of pleasure. You can listen to a sad song or read a dark novel and experience intellectual pleasure from it. And finally, it comes through the senses. And that’s chiefly where the pleasure resides. A great novel which is also a sad novel may bring you pleasure through its lovely sentences.

Back to our task.

Eliot doesn’t feel like he’s quite justified himself and his account of the creative Christian as servant to God, so he elaborates in the next few lines:

For Man is joined spirit and body,
And therefore must serve as spirit and body.
Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man;
Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple;
You must not deny the body.

The point here is that we have a gnostic tendency to split the spirit from the body and privilege the former, so that spiritual works like prayer, fasting, attending church, reading the Bible, giving alms, singing hymns, etc are holy while more bodily works like the creative arts (or, I would add, physically building the church and caring for it!) are a waste of time. They are unnecessary and a distraction from the true work of the Church which is sharing the gospel or worshiping God or electing the correct president or whatever they say it is. And Eliot’s response is that this is just a wrong anthropology. A biblical anthropology says that we are both spirit and body, and we “must serve as spirit and body,” including in the “Temple.” His stern warning is, “You must not deny the body.” Because by over-spiritualizing the faith, many have turned away from the body and bodily works like the creative arts and their value. I would add that in Eliot’s mind art involves the joining of spirit and body, but it’s the inclusion of the body at all that troubles some people.

Now, we must admit here that Eliot is more than a bit biased in his analysis. He is a Christian poet trying to make space for himself in the Church of England. But I think he’s correct that the creative arts have a powerful role to play in serving the LORD, and that in them, spirit and body are joined, and we can bear witness to the transcendent wonder of creation, the horror of the fallenness of the world, the beauty of redemption, and a million other themes that bring honor to God and edify our neighbor. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in a time when there is so much chaos and confusion, we need more Christians involved in the arts to offer an embodied witness to the faith.

The question before us is, will we bring our gifts before the Lord, or will we hoard them for ourselves or the world?