Sin and Bad Taste

One of the challenges of a Christian aesthetics is sorting through the connections and distinctions between holiness and good taste on the one hand, and sin and bad taste on the other. In his 1989 book, Religious Aesthetics , Frank Burch Brown offers some thoughtful reflections on this question. Here are some of the highlights:

1) Brown begins by stating an “antinomy.” On the one hand, aesthetic taste does not seem an important concern for Christian theology: “for instance, ‘bad taste’ is not considered a deadly or venial sin. Nor is it generally condemned as a hindrance to sanctification or spiritual maturity. Impeccable taste, moreover, is hardly deemed to be one of the ‘fruits of the spirit.’” On the other hand, “aesthetic sensitivity and judgment is so integral to the moral and religious life that people whose aesthetic taste is dull or perverse are in an unenviable position. The possibility that bad taste may be a MORAL liability is suggested in fact by the quite traditional notion that sin ?Ewhich is not only wrong but also profoundly ugly ?Elooks alluring to the unwary, whereas virtue ?Ewhich is not only right but profoundly beautiful ?Efrequently appears drab at first sight.” Much of the chapter that Brown devotes to these questions is an effort to undo this antinomy.

2) He begins that undoing by asking what “taste” means, ultimately reducing it to three elements. First, “apperception” is the “activity by which we ‘take in’ and attend to the aesthetic features of an object,” a process that involves imagination and thought as well as sensation and emotion. Apperception is thus something more than perception. Brown suggests that the dog in front of the Victrola may perceive sound but does not “apperceive” music.

Second, “appraisal,” grounded in apperception, is the “critical and evaluative aspect of taste.” Appraisal accompanies all apperception, but in the strict or full sense appraisal is “a conscious judgment of aesthetic status” that is not identical to one’s personal likes and dislikes. One can appraise a work as excellent without having a personal taste for that kind of work.

Finally, appreciation is a personal and private response. Though connected intimately with apperception and appraisal, reflection can distinguish appreciation from the other two features of taste. Appreciation is partly dependent on background, mood, and other circumstantial factors that accompany aesthetic experience. I might appreciate a certain kind of music for nostalgic reasons, but I might judge the same work to be inferior regardless.

3) Brown suggests that aesthetic taste is “in one or more ways intrinsic to ‘glorifying and enjoying God.’” Aesthetic taste, first, has a moral dimension, and this in several respects: there are analogies, he argues, between aesthetic taste and moral judgment; he cites Marcia Cavell’s suggest that the ability to reason morally depends on being able to experience the familiar in unfamiliar ways, which is a kind of aesthetic talent; and because aesthetic excellence is good for life its promotion is good for humanity. He goes on to suggest a number of ways in which religious and aesthetic experience are connected: aesthetic and religious experience may be analogous to one another; at times, the two may be so intertwined that there is no way to separate them ?Eas in participation in a well-formed and beautiful liturgy; many works in Western art cannot be appreciated AS ART without some attention to the religious elements and themes.

Brown draws the following conclusion: “What is seldom if ever explicitly stated by any of these theorists is the logical deduction that, if at least part of what we consider to be aesthetic is analogous to, ingredient in, or an instance of what we regard as distinctly religious, and if aesthetica cannot even be recognized ?Elet alone appraised or appreciated ?Eapart from taste, then taste has a unique place in religion itself. It must be seen as an intrinsic part of adequately or inadequately glorifying and enjoying God.” When we see the glory of God in creation, we are responding aesthetically to the beauty of God; when we discern a coherent and subtle plot in historical events, including the events of our lives, that is both an aesthetic and a theological (or a theoaesthetic) judgment.

4) What about the notorious subjectivity of taste ?Ebeauty in the eye of the beholder? Brown suggests that “all evaluations involving aesthetic taste are to some extent communal both in formation and application rather than completely private and/or universal. When claiming aesthetic excellence for any work of art or nature, one rationally cannot and need not claim that everyone ought to find the same thing excellent. One is not commanding all people everywhere to take pleasure in what one finds aesthetically excellent, but commending it to others on the basis of a conviction (subject to modification) that some and perhaps many significant groups of people with good taste would appreciate it to a high degree or would come to do so in time. Even then, one knows that the degree of appreciation can be expected to fluctuate as communities of taste change.” Though “the idea of a perfectly stable classic is an illusion,” yet “the idea of a classic is not itself illusory.” Thus taste is “dynamic rather than static, and communal rather than strictly private . . . . Good taste, therefore, cannot be solely the possession of any one community, and certainly not of the culturally elite.”

5) Brown describes several sorts of bad taste. First, aestheticism is bad taste, since it involves appreciation and enjoyment of beauty that is not for the glory of God, and may often be a kind of idolatry of aesthetic experience per se. Second, the philistine has bad taste because he finds enjoyment only in the religious and moral features of a work of art, and evaluates them wholly on those bases. Third, intolerance is bad taste, treating all “folk” and “popular” art as beneath notice and defending the taste of a particular aesthetic elite. Finally, indiscriminate taste is bad taste.

There are some things here that might be formulated better. On the one hand, Brown perhaps sets up moral and aesthetic, in too modern a fashion, as separate realms of concern; though he eventually comes to the point of seeing their union, there are points in the argument where the initial opposition does some damage. On the other hand, more surely needs to be said about the discontinuities between aesthetic and moral judgments. Perhaps Brown would be happy to affirm that moral standards are as community-specific as aesthetic ones, but I am not. I suspect that this concern also grows out of Brown’s initial mapping of the field into moral, religious, and aesthetic zones.