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Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task
Rainbows for the Fallen Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task by Calvin Seerveld.
254 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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205 people want to read
About the author
Calvin G. Seerveld
40 books7 followersCalvin George Seerveld was an American poet, philosopher and academic.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 16, 2015
Absolutely a MUST-READ for anyone interested in art, aesthetics, and the cultural mandate. Embracing the aesthetic aspect of life has largely been dismissed as superfluous by evangelicals in recent history. Calvin Seerveld issues a stern rebuke: "If older Christians do not like the secular novels their young people read, cannot stand the songs and films mass-produced to capture and twist the imagination of millions around us, are nonplussed by godless contemporary art, what can they expect if no redemptive, imaginatively rich alternative has been engaged in by Christ’s body for sustained years of work; what can they expect if it hasn’t even started? We must come to understand the unwisdom of having run as far away from plastic art and gritty literature as our sanctified legs can run."
Seerveld insists, “If the aesthetic moment is missing in daily active responses to God and neighbor in the world, then that life is shorn of a great praise potential and you are liable to a closed down kind of grim slavery.”
Calvin Seerveld helps us understand that art is one of the manifestations of humanity's call to work. “Art is work, hard, bodily work that can legitimately be a man or woman’s vocation. We have to get past the idea inherited from pagan Greek society (and often compounded by pietism) that poetry takes less of a man’s energy and presence than work with the hands, or that dance is by definition more sensuous and useless than architecturally planning a barn or singing in the church choir. Art is always the act of a whole man or woman, and no matter what form it takes—colored shapes, pulsing tones, rhymed words, stylized gesture—if it be honestly done, the art embodies heart, soul, mind and strength of the artist as he or she responds knowingly to the world of God around him.”
He cautions us not to place too much emphasis on art in the Platonic category of “beauty,” but rather to think of art as yet another type of vocational work. It is special in that it has the ability to create metaphor, to work as parable so that we can understand things from a different vantage point. “Art calls to our attention in capital, cursive letters, as it were, what usually flits by in reality as fine print.”
Art is wonderful because it uses and captures the imagination. Seerveld identifies the aesthetic life as “the ordinary human activity to be humored and to be merry, to indulge imagining things and to be playful.”
Seerveld insists, “If the aesthetic moment is missing in daily active responses to God and neighbor in the world, then that life is shorn of a great praise potential and you are liable to a closed down kind of grim slavery.”
Calvin Seerveld helps us understand that art is one of the manifestations of humanity's call to work. “Art is work, hard, bodily work that can legitimately be a man or woman’s vocation. We have to get past the idea inherited from pagan Greek society (and often compounded by pietism) that poetry takes less of a man’s energy and presence than work with the hands, or that dance is by definition more sensuous and useless than architecturally planning a barn or singing in the church choir. Art is always the act of a whole man or woman, and no matter what form it takes—colored shapes, pulsing tones, rhymed words, stylized gesture—if it be honestly done, the art embodies heart, soul, mind and strength of the artist as he or she responds knowingly to the world of God around him.”
He cautions us not to place too much emphasis on art in the Platonic category of “beauty,” but rather to think of art as yet another type of vocational work. It is special in that it has the ability to create metaphor, to work as parable so that we can understand things from a different vantage point. “Art calls to our attention in capital, cursive letters, as it were, what usually flits by in reality as fine print.”
Art is wonderful because it uses and captures the imagination. Seerveld identifies the aesthetic life as “the ordinary human activity to be humored and to be merry, to indulge imagining things and to be playful.”
June 21, 2018
May be the best book on aesthetics and the Christian worldview I have yet read.
August 8, 2023
A fascinating take on attempting to forward a Christian mode of art and artistry. The core principle, that art is a key component of cultivation of this world and therefore very much worth the consideration of Christians, is a good one, as is his dismissiveness towards kitsch and towards Christian art that is totally in the past and removed from the world in which it exists.
As someone who believes that art is a precious commodity and often wonders why there seem to be few Christians engaged with art in a serious manner, this book posed questions, provided possible answers, and paved possibilities for paths forward.
As someone who believes that art is a precious commodity and often wonders why there seem to be few Christians engaged with art in a serious manner, this book posed questions, provided possible answers, and paved possibilities for paths forward.
June 14, 2025
Seerveld does an excellent job advocating for a robust aesthetic life from a Reformed perspective. His enthusiasm for celebrating life through engaging art is contagious.
I appreciated his explanation of “allusiveness” but found his writing off of beauty to be a bit disappointing, especially after his use of the Psalms previously in Chapters 1 and 2. Is not allusiveness often beautiful? And cannot a belief in beauty produce a belief in a Creator?
I appreciated his explanation of “allusiveness” but found his writing off of beauty to be a bit disappointing, especially after his use of the Psalms previously in Chapters 1 and 2. Is not allusiveness often beautiful? And cannot a belief in beauty produce a belief in a Creator?
February 8, 2023
For those Reformed Christians interested in taking art seriously: read this. Seerveld is a gem. His writing itself is a work of art, though it may be a bit of a chore to dig through at times because of the theological and philosophical density.
September 8, 2024
Easily in my top 5 most influential books.
July 23, 2016
Seerveld has many interesting insights that I will find useful to pass along:
Explanation of the need for a fuller life: "If anyone, especially in our differentiated civilization, should purposely try to exclude artistic cultivating from human development or make it optional, that person would be culturally atavistic and would be handicapping people, resisting how God structured his special creatures to unfold. Being in Christ is more important than being literate, just as staying alive is more basic than being married. But once you are healthily alive, God says, why not leave Father and Mother and enter the joy of marriage I created for your fullness (Genesis 2:18-25, Ecclesiastes 9:7-10)? And once you are children of God, the Lord says, grow up artistically or you'll be tongue-tied and unable to glory in all that singing, painting, music, mime and dance and story-telling going on in heaving and on the new earth!" p181
A definition of Christian "anything" that I find challenging: "... christian art (= art marked by compassionate judgment honoring Jesus Christ's Rule in its very sensible corpus)."p182
For art students: "(2) Conceive art as work an undergo its training like a trade. No one thing has ruined art so much in Western civilization as the cumulative nonsense about the artist as supra-rational genius, the pious talk about 'creativity,' and the Romanticist creed that an undisciplined bohemian life affords the milieu most conducive for having artistic 'inspiration' strike. Such adulatory isolation may prime artist egos, but it inevitably undermines the ministry of christian art." p196
Explanation of the need for a fuller life: "If anyone, especially in our differentiated civilization, should purposely try to exclude artistic cultivating from human development or make it optional, that person would be culturally atavistic and would be handicapping people, resisting how God structured his special creatures to unfold. Being in Christ is more important than being literate, just as staying alive is more basic than being married. But once you are healthily alive, God says, why not leave Father and Mother and enter the joy of marriage I created for your fullness (Genesis 2:18-25, Ecclesiastes 9:7-10)? And once you are children of God, the Lord says, grow up artistically or you'll be tongue-tied and unable to glory in all that singing, painting, music, mime and dance and story-telling going on in heaving and on the new earth!" p181
A definition of Christian "anything" that I find challenging: "... christian art (= art marked by compassionate judgment honoring Jesus Christ's Rule in its very sensible corpus)."p182
For art students: "(2) Conceive art as work an undergo its training like a trade. No one thing has ruined art so much in Western civilization as the cumulative nonsense about the artist as supra-rational genius, the pious talk about 'creativity,' and the Romanticist creed that an undisciplined bohemian life affords the milieu most conducive for having artistic 'inspiration' strike. Such adulatory isolation may prime artist egos, but it inevitably undermines the ministry of christian art." p196
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July 26, 2020Provocative and important work for anyone thinking about the relationship between Christianity and aesthetics, as well as makers and teachers of art. A much deeper engagement with art's purpose and potential than typical evangelical worldview analysis. Seerveld covers aesthetic theory, art history, the place of art in culture, and more. He also gives a nice defense of modern art against shallow conservative objections. However, his critiques of classical views of beauty are too brief and not quite convincing. A star docked because of several sections filled with almost unreadable Dooyeweerdian jargon. Still essential reading overall in the area of theological aesthetics.
August 30, 2016
Great, faithful approach of encouraging arts within a Christian life. Truth is out there and it doesn't require explicit language in order to point people to Jesus. The Creator is evident in creation and a concerted effort to use the gifts and skills provided by that Creator produces evidence of that Truth to the glory of the Master Artist.
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October 24, 2007highly recommended - on art
March 20, 2014
I've found I can't read this right before bed--my brain might boil over.
July 20, 2013
still reading
Want to read
August 25, 2016Recommended as "a fine book on aesthetics," by William Edgar in Reasons of the Heart: Recovering Christian Persuasion.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews