Near the middle of the artist Makoto Fujimura’s most recent book, Art and Faith, we are told the story of 15th-century shogun Yoshimasa Ashikawa sending broken teaware to China for repair. The items were returned “fixed” using metal staples. The warlord, understandably dismayed, instructed his potter to search for a better technique, something that wouldn’t just repair a bowl but improve it. Ashikawa’s search, anecdotally at least, is the origin story of the art of kintsugi, or using gold to fill in the various cracks between pottery shards, “creating a work of beauty through brokenness.” For Fujimura, it’s also a symbol of the role of the artist in the world and for the role of human beings living in a fallen universe: not just to repair or curate, but to participate in the divine by using the broken fragments of our lives as the raw material for the creation of beauty.
Fujimura is an artist (a painter, primarily), but he is first and foremost a Christian. His faith is his foundation. But between the deep blue mineral pigment cascades of a work such as Walking on Water — Azurite II and his equally moving books, such as Silence and Beauty, there isn’t any sense of subordinating art to faith or vice versa. Instead, they work in conversation with one another. Fujimura uses his art to deepen his faith, and in the process, his art takes on a grandeur and substance it might not otherwise have. As he writes in Art and Faith, “I have come to believe that unless we are making something, we cannot know the depths of God’s being and God’s grace permeating our lives and God’s creation.”
The subtitle of Art and Faith is “A Theology of Making.” Creativity being one of the few things held in common between God and man, Fujimura asks us to think of art as an act of spiritual devotion. “The Theology of Making,” he writes, “assumes that human creativity echoes God’s character and is made in God’s image in some way. So when I state ‘God THE ultimate Artist,’ I am not trying to define the original Creator by human terms. I am stating a presupposition up front that the very definition of ‘art’ may need to be redefined by biblical and Godly terms, and that God is the only true Artist that exists.” When the artist performs a creative act, in other words, he’s actually engaging with God in the process of creating the “new world” to come. Fujimura’s philosophy of creation recalls the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil’s notion of attention as a religious act. For Weil, paying attention means emptying out the bric-a-brac of the self in order to let God find us in our emptiness. Art for Fujimura, like attention for Weil, is a way in which we can witness God’s kingdom in the world.
One of the most beautiful aspects of Art and Faith, and I would argue one of the most appealing aspects of Christianity itself, is the insistence that though the world is broken, its brokenness is the basis of its rebirth. Just as the resurrected Christ, resplendent in his perfected body, still bore the wounds of his crucifixion, and just as the kintsugi cup becomes brilliant with its gilded fractures, so the world is made perfect through its imperfection, not in spite of it. The very idea of “brokenness,” Fujimura tells us, implies a crass utilitarian dichotomy between useful and useless. “By honoring the brokenness,” he writes, “the broken shapes can somehow be a necessary component of the New World to come. This is the most outrageous promise of the Bible, which is at the heart of the Theology of Making: not only are we restored, we are to partake in the co-creation of the New.”
Art and Faith is obviously primarily meant for Christians. Anyone unfamiliar with Biblical quotations or theology might be put off a bit at first. But the book has its charms for unbelievers, too. Fujimura often uses moving personal anecdotes — his mother’s unexpected death, his experiences of 9/11, gardening in Princeton, his son beginning to date — that lure us in with their warmth, humor, and tenderness. And anyone interested in the creative act itself or worried about our culture’s elevation of consuming over making will find plenty to mull over.
There’s another kintsugi legend related in the book that speaks to the underappreciated connection between art and mercy. When the tea master Yusai Hosokawa was preparing tea for the warlord Hideyoshi, the warlord’s attendant dropped a piece of the teaware, shattering it. When Hideyoshi raised his hand to strike his attendant, Hosokawa stayed the warlord’s hand by singing a poem that suggested he was taking responsibility for the young servant’s mistake. “This act of compassion became the basis of kintsugi … creating a work of beauty through brokenness.” This connection between mercy and the creation of a new world is mysterious but very real; Fujimura’s book doesn’t “resolve” this mystery or “fix” it but instead allows it to live within the poetry of the language itself. The theologian Stanley Hauerwas said in an interview that if in 100 years “Christians are people identified as those who do not kill their children or their elderly, we would have been doing something right.” After reading Art and Faith, one might add “and who create” to that list.
Scott Beauchamp is an editor for Landmarks, the journal of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. His most recent book is Did You Kill Anyone?
