Makoto Fujimura’s Ways to God: A Review of Art and Faith
When considering Thomas Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God, it is important to see that the proofs are called viae. If read carefully, they act as ways or routes. We start from creation and, following a certain path, arrive at “that which we call God.” The proofs are paths of ascent. But we should not neglect another directionality. For when we travel to the Source, we traverse the route the Source travels to us. In each via, we find a way that God creates. Take efficient causation. Traveling from the realization that we exist in a world in which there is causation, we ask: What causes causation? Or, to highlight the directionality: Where does causation come from? What we find is that there must be a Cause uncaused that causes causation, a Maker unmade that makes things that can make. Having traveled the route to God, we glimpse the route God travels in creating. In traveling these routes, we discover not only God but ourselves. God causes us to be so that we can be causers; we are made by the Maker so that we can be makers.
Makoto Fujimura travels a similar itinerary in his Art and Faith: A Theology of Making. Moving from his experience of art, he ascends to consider God, God’s artistic ways, and the ways that our art images God. As Fujimura writes, “I rest in my quiet space, waiting for the paper surface to dry. As I wait, I write. Art making to me is a discipline of awareness, prayer, and praise.” Amidst his creating, Fujimura moves from his making to his Maker and back again. This delightful book is the fruit of this artistic ascending and descending. In it, Fujimura teaches us what he has learned on his path to God, and in so doing reveals the depth dimension to any artistic making, but particularly the making that dares to take the name Christian art.
Dwelling in his own artmaking, Fujimura explores the insight that God is the fundamental artist. In attending to himself as an artist and finding from this that God is Artist, Fujimura finds that God is the only true Artist. Fujimura, like Thomas, finds a revelatory surprise in any analogical thinking about God. God ends up flipping our analogy. We begin with the claim that God is like us and find, as we delve into this, that we are like God. We thought a word properly applied to us and analogical to God, but the word properly applies to God and only analogically to us. Fujimura writes, “when I speak of God as Artist, I am speaking of God not just as the only true Creator… but also the originator of origins, the creator of the notion of Maker. . . . God is the only true Artist that exists.” The flipping of analogical thinking does not negate the value of the human artist; rather, it exults the mundane work of making. Sure, we are not the originating artist, but in making we are like God. The artistic via reveals the divine at work in and through us. God is the Artisan of the created world.
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As artist, God is no technician. Artists frees what they make. The thing made is offered to the world to be interpreted, enjoyed, and used. The artist frees the artwork to be what it will be. Like any artist, God frees what he makes but does so in a superabundant way. What does God free us for? To be makers: poets of the created world. This is not only isolated to the Christian or follower of God. To be like God is not first to be religious but first to be a maker. Fujimura writes that “the essential question is not whether we are religious, but whether we are making something.” This is not to say that his book is irreligious. Rather, it allows the grace of revelation, particularly Scripture, to disclose the reality of nature.
Art and Faith traverses the ascending and descending ways to God. As such, it never negates the starting point of the ascent. The religious artist might be able to see farther along the ascent, but the secular artist, in making, acts like God. As such, the work of artists is a kind of “prevenient grace… operating throughout.” For Fujimura, this means that God is a “God of all cultures.” Even if the “secular” artist does not “understand the origin of the experience,” it is still the case that “God commissions all people to create for the New.” There is a sense that Christian artists are only different from other artists in that they realize that they are a Christian artist. All art, in some sense, is Christian: because all art is oriented toward the making, all art participates in the artistic activity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Each one of us, then, is to create and to craft. We might throw our hands up and declare “I’m no artist.” But the making that Fujimura speaks of us is not only the preserve of fine artists or even the talented. To make bread, to make someone’s day, to make love, to make a cup of tea, to make your own batch of beer, to make music, to make a garden, to help children make a painting. These are the works of artists, of artisans of the created world.
To once again be artisans is to reject a vision of God as technocrat and humans as consumers. We must invert the market culture’s frantically busy passivity. Constantly doing, we are never making. For Fujimura, once we stop making, “we become enslaved to market culture as mere consumers.” The more we lose connection with the vocation of making, the more we lose touch with the Maker. If the way to God begins from the realization that I am an artist, then it is essential for our religious lives to maintain this realization. If we lose it, we lose the starting point from which we can begin our ascent. We end up knowing neither God nor ourselves.
To lose the feel for making is to lose the feel for God. Fujimura writes powerfully of the need for Christians to reengage with this finesse for making and set aside the culture wars of apologetics. The former testifies to a deep faith. To make something is to trust in the goodness of making. The latter shows a lack of confidence. As Fujimura writes, “the more that theists put themselves on the stage to defend God’s existence, the more we fall on the false dichotomy that God can exist or not.” To defend God is to fear that God depends on us. What then are we to do in a Christ-forgetting world? “Instead of debating, we ought to be involved in Making.” The point is “not to ‘prove’ God’s existence, but to affirm the source of creativity and imagination.” Imagine if more dioceses commissioned artists, if more parishes started gardens, if more time was spent making soup for the poor and less on making polemics for social media, if more churches opened their doors to let people see the beauty within. This is the path of religious making.
But it is not a primrose path. We create from and within the brokenness of ourselves. Fujimura reveals this in his most beautiful chapter, on Kintsugi theology. Kintsugi takes broken pottery and fixes it so that the brokenness is still seen and yet made beautiful. The work of the human as artist is to create “a work of beauty through brokenness.” Kintsugi theology is best expressed in the Resurrection, in which the broken body of Jesus is restored but his wounds remain. The glory of God is most fully expressed in those resurrected wounds.
The Resurrected Jesus testifies that there is a new world coming and all our making is oriented to this Newness. Fujimura writes, “I create from a vision of the world to come, and not just from the broken realities I experience today.” While Fujimura insists on the rich commonalities of artists creating within and without Christianity, he affirms that the Christian artist sees something that other artists do not. If God is truly Artist, then this world of broken realities will not be the only one that God makes. God is not done making. Eye has not seen this eschatological artwork, nor has ear heard the eternal symphony. We, the hard of sight and hard of hearing, must do the work that builds and anticipates the new creation, holding with confidence that God will heal the broken pottery of our lives and our creations. Our work is not about polemics or abstract theology. It is the work of making—of art and artifacts but also of families and communities. A making attuned to the Kingdom that comes.
“Every act of creativity is an intuitive response to offer back to God what has been given to us.” This offering back is traveling back and forth on the pathways to and from God. At the end of the day, the most important work we craft is our own lives. For Fujimura, the crafting of self ultimately means being the “fiery body of Christ.” This is to dwell in, to ignite, and to be ignited by the refiner’s fire. For all our pottery, we ourselves are the pottery. To make, for us, is to be made.
Much of the Christian world simmers, feuds, and fades. What we need to do is start making art in ways that set hearts on fire. We need to help reopen the pathways to God. Fujimura’s book is a guide for this rekindling and reopening. What this will look like for each will vary as much as each person varies. Fujimura’s skill and originality as a painter are an inspiration, but to read this book is to learn that our skill and originality are not essential. What is essential is to make as God makes, to travel the way to the Lord, to be the artisans of the created world.
Terence Sweeney is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Villanova University, theologian-in-residence at the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, and editor of The Genealogies of Modernity Project.