he study or appreciation of beauty is inextricably tied to theology; all aesthetic works — visual arts, literature, or music — either recognize the Christian worldview or reject it, either glorify God or deny Him. There is no neutral ground in the world of aesthetic culture.
However, many Christians attempt to find neutral ground in aesthetics, especially when the discussion is framed in terms of "taste." In twentieth century western society, there is almost universal opposition to any evaluation of personal taste according to set standards of right and wrong; such opposition exists even among Christians, who will allow that we must not tolerate what is blatantly immoral, but who insist that God has nothing to say about taste beyond that.
The roots of this attempt to make aesthetics a neutral ground go at least as far back as the Medieval debates over the nature of the relationship between faith and reason. They can be traced through the Renaissance and through the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; they can be seen in the "Enlightenment" when the widening split between faith and reason gave birth to Deism. And they can most certainly be observed in the Romantic period wherein the artist — poet, musician, painter — adopted the role of a kind of prophet, living above "outmoded" laws of morality and ethics, and pointing the way to a better world.
In the late Victorian era the literature of England reflected this split. Faith had been mortally wounded by an autonomous science (Darwin and his precursors), an autonomous theology (Higher Criticism and comparative religion), and a new autonomous philosophy (psychoanalysis). The church made a feeble attempt to protect faith from total annihilation by separating it from reason, allowing the two to have distinct spheres of authority. Of course, this meant that faith could have nothing relevant to say to reason and science, but by this point the appeasers had nothing to say anyway.
Of course, art and literature reflected the split. By the early twentieth century, Freud had had a profound impact on literature, as did Frazer, with his influential work on comparative religion and mythology, The Golden Bough. Freud's influence can be seen, in fiction and poetry, in the sense of the irrational and chaotic workings of the unconscious mind, and its power over rationality; Frazer's in the pervasive idea of cultural relativity. So the resulting Modernist movement deliberately and sharply revolted against the values of the previous half-millennium of English literature in their attempt to reconcile their aesthetic viewpoints with cultural movements driven by Freud, Frazer, and Darwin, and with the shock they were suffering after World War I, which put an end to the apathy of the late Victorian era. Culture began to look for a new savior, and found it in art.
The attitude had already developed that good aesthetic taste is somehow a mark or means of moral or spiritual advancement. This was the result of seeking relevance for the arts when their significance seemed to have been destroyed. Against this new attitude the church was powerless, having accepted the split between religious truth and the world. Matthew Arnold, a writer of the Mid-Victorian period, saw cultural and aesthetic values as a solution for societal problems, because religion had been destroyed. A few decades later, a man named Benedetto Croce asserted that the activities of the reason and imagination are autonomous means of moral improvement, co-equal with the spirit and will. Early in this century, the critic I. A. Richards (one of C. S. Lewis's perpetual opponents) gave to good aesthetic taste what Lewis calls "a kind of soteriological function" — although what we need saving from is nothing so "primitive" as sin.
Critical theories of the last few decades hold that since everyone is limited by biases and presuppositions, there is no objective check on the free play of the imagination, and no objective standard by which to judge art. They say that no objective reality exists at all, which makes the current political, sociological agenda the standard by which art is judged.
At this juncture it is necessary to point out that the one major anomaly in this historical process of the divorce of aesthetic culture from the government of morality was the culture of the Reformation and its English descendants, the Puritans. Many branches of Protestantism, particularly the Lutherans and Anglicans, were for centuries active participants in the development of aesthetic culture, but these groups overall were not exceptions to the aesthetic apostacy described above, whereas the Puritans, for a much longer period of time, were indeed exceptions. The reason they avoided the divorce between theology and culture was the nature of their theology — but even they eventually shared in the general apostasy. But this was precisely because they abandoned those elements that had previously been the foundation of the advancement of Christ's kingdom through all the earth. We can therefore see that the apostasy of art was not a historical inevitability, but the result of the apostasy of the church from sound doctrine and the resulting biblical worldview.
So if we return to a biblical worldview, modern aesthetic theory must be flatly rejected, because it rests upon lies. The teaching of Scripture on culture is not the same as that of much of contemporary western Christianity. Because Christians have given up everything but the most basic moral issues, they say either that everything not geared immediately toward "soul-winning" is of no value, or that it does not come under the authority of the Bible. This has been the pattern of evangelicalism throughout most of the last century and a half, following the Great Apostasy. As a result, aesthetic pursuits are seen as spiritually valueless. But now many Christians have discovered that the loss of any ground at all was a major tactical error (if not outright sin); the teaching of Scripture is that all belongs to God the Creator and Redeemer. "Take every thought captive" means exactly that — every thought.
