I don’t know whether or not to recommend State of the Arts, a 1991 book by Gene Veith. I’m not an artist. I appreciate art, but his book exposes the limited validity of thinking “I know what I like” is a critique of art. This being said, I did learn two important points from it. One how to read the Song of Songs and definitively why rap, doctrinally accurate or not, has no place in the Divine Service, liturgy, and worship. And no, that is not just my subjective opinion that is an objective fact as Veith shows.
First, the lesser of the two confrontations. Veith goes over Song of Solomon 4:1-5 and says we Westerners have difficulty with this kind of poetry because we read like ancient Greeks. Greek imagination and our own is primarily visual. Hebrew imagination isn’t. It draws on a wide range of senses and associations. We read “Your two breasts are like two fawns”, and we see a picture of jarring absurdity. (I have contemplated this passage several times while deer hunting and never came up with anything but funny images.)
Things change according to Veith, once we realize that the image is not visual but tactile. He avers, “the sensuousness of the description is overwhelming.” When Solomon, Veith says “the poet”, declares her cheeks are like pomegranates, he’s not saying they look like them which would be a bad complexion, but he has a fragrance and perhaps even a taste in mind.
“Hebrew imagery is also associated, with an image calling to mind other images and connotations, all of which suggest a texture of meaning.” “Here is poetry of the highest order, describing the Shulamite, not one dimensionally, but richly. The lover is attracted not only by what she looks like, but what she feels like when he touches her, what she tastes like, the associations of sheep fields and battle that she calls to his mind.” “This is not the eroticism of the voyeur – pornography tends to stress the visual and thus creates a sense of distance and detachment from the sexual ‘object.’ Rather, this is the eroticism of marriage, conveying and overwhelming sense of closeness, intimacy, and genuine love” (Veith, State of the Arts, 157-8). Worth noting, yes?
As prelude to dealing with rap as liturgy or catechesis or helpful at all, first be divested, as I was by Veith, of the fallacy that Christianity can be successfully expressed in every single style of an age. The nearest I ever came to this sentiment was repeating Augustin’s mantra that the Church being the Church whether dressed in rags or riches does not lead to the conclusion: therefore, we should dress her in rags.
Veith is better: “Some styles are wholly interwoven with aberrant philosophies (indeed, such styles are often nothing more than philosophical statements, which is why they are so bad aesthetically). Sometimes Christians follow a particular style uncritically without recognizing the implicit contradictions between their faith and the style they are using to express it. Such incompatibility between form and content results in bad Christian art. (Late Victorian sentimentality, heavy metal nihilism, pop culture consumerism would not seem to accord with Biblical sensibility, but such misbegotten hybrids fill the Christian bookstores.)” (Veith, State of the Arts, 165).
The closest I ever got to this wisdom was saying that no one prior to the 60s would have denied that the medium is the message. And a layman’s observation that contemporary worship isn’t the organic growth of liturgy which the Church has always known but the devolution of liturgy.
