The Sacramental Vision
Priests Alex Sosler and Gary Ball tackle competing visions of what art is, and what it’s for.
Review by Najma Zahira
Armed with a rudimentary understanding of art history, I make my way into battle (the art museum), prepared to stand, sit, and contemplate for appropriate amounts of time and read every placard I come across. Then comes the piece that captures my attention—there’s always one. This time, it was The Raft of the Medusa by Thomas Gericault. I became lost in the intricate forms, the delicate lines, the way the shadows danced across the oil mimicking life, as if the flag-bearer was calling out to me, yelling, “Save us!”
Beauty is a curious thing, and it’s the job of the artist to pin it down. In their book The Artistic Vision, authors Alex Sosler and Gary Ball explore the relationship between artists, creation, and beauty. They provide a framework for creation that guides artists deeper into connection with beauty and challenges their readers to consider: what is art for?
Sosler and Ball are both Anglican priests in Asheville, North Carolina, a town known for being home to a vibrant arts community. Sosler is an assistant professor at Montreat College, where his research focuses on spiritual formation and the theology of art. Ball, in addition to being the founding rector of his church, is a practicing artist (it is his art on the cover of the book).
Ball was inspired to write this book when he noticed a tension among artists in their congregation: they were confused about how to meld their faith life and their artistic life. Expressing your faith outright through art could lead to pigeonholing as a “Christian Artist,” so many artists checked their faith at the studio door. They wound up unsatisfied and unfulfilled. Together with Sosler, Ball wrote this book to guide the lost artist towards beauty and the unification of these two strands of life.
Siloing artistic creation in either the material or the emotional realm deprives that art of a higher meaning.
What fuels this dissatisfaction in artists? Sosler and Ball say it’s a lack of the right vision. Not a vision of what the artist wants to create, but rather a vision of the world, of beauty, and of God that perfectly aligns. They call this “the sacramental imagination.” Artists, they argue, should aim to cultivate a sacramental imagination, a way of viewing the world that seeks to reveal the innate spiritual qualities of every material thing. “Every created thing has a sacramental quality because it shares in the life of God, because it is created,” they write. The material world ceases to be merely inanimate and instead is imbued with the Creator’s everlasting signature. In the sacramental imagination, creation is an effort to bring that signature to the forefront of life.
Art created with this sacramental vision has the ability to draw its audience closer to the truth hidden within. Sosler and Ball describe this as art “pointing up” toward the divine. Good art, they say, inspires the viewer to look inward—but great art prompts the viewer to look up. Sosler and Ball want artists to make great art, so they break down and dispel some other artistic visions that lead only to “good art.”
A materialistic vision of creation reduces art solely to the medium, they contend, ignoring the broader context of the piece and any associated meanings. Art can reach back in history, towards the future, and out to the present in truly remarkable ways (the Raft of the Medusa is a great example of this). When it is purely about form and function, art loses this essential quality.
The spiritualist vision, on the other hand, overcorrects, fully rejecting any association with the material. This can manifest in multiple ways, but sentimentality stands out the most. Sentimentality is creating art for no other reason than to elicit an emotional response; it’s creating feelings for feelings’ sake. Sosler and Ball dislike this kind of art, writing, “Art, then can only be familiar; art can never take us higher because there is no higher. There is only what is.” But matter matters. It “shows something of the spiritual presence of God.”
Siloing artistic creation in either the material or the emotional realm deprives that art of a higher meaning. As Sosler and Ball write, “We don’t look at the mere material object (materialist) or past the material object (spiritualist) but in and through the object to the Divine Creator.” In order for art to point us towards the divine, you can’t have one or the other, you need both. The sacramental imagination rests on this foundation.
Sosler and Ball wrote this book for “Christian artists and those who love them,” but they’re aware that the tension between the spiritualist and materialist visions has appeared in the Church before. They juxtapose past religious movements that sought to distance themselves from spiritual mysteries with modernity, reminding us that these dynamics are not new. If anything, they are achingly human.
One of the movements they cite is gnosticism, a two-thousand-year-old heresy that emphasizes personal spiritual knowledge above all. Gnostics rejected the material world, believing the soul and the body were completely separate entities and one only needed to care for the spiritual, not the material. Critics like the church father Tertullian wrote vigorously against them, affirming the connection between the material and the spiritual, and holding up Christ as the exemplar, fully human and fully divine.
The gnostics are long-gone (for the most part), but vestiges of their theology are seen throughout modern life. Quoting Wendell Berry, Sosler and Ball describe it as the “dualism of body and soul.” It’s the modern tendency to cleave ourselves into separate parts. From our online personas and who we are behind the screen to the person we are at work and outside of it (any Severance fans?), we’ve fallen into a quasi-gnosticism, refusing to acknowledge that there’s something in us that can’t be segmented.
As Tertullian did, Sosler and Ball hold up Christ as the answer: “When we see beauty, we participate in it and become acquainted with its source. Beauty is communicative and allows us to participate with the divine maker.” Art is the language of the divine conversation between Christ and his people. When we fully participate in that conversation, we are made whole.
Najma Zahira holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Dartmouth College. She currently works in Boston, where she can be found relaxing outside on a nice day.
The Artistic Vision: Cultivating a Sacramental Imagination for Creative Practice was published by Wipf and Stock Publishers in July 2024. Fare Forward appreciates the provision of a review copy. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
