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Something important that we don’t often hear about today is the concept of the artist as prophet.  In treating the topic, we should first go back to the meaning of the word “prophet” in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Hebrew word itself seems to mean something like “mutterer,” which isn’t all that flattering, but the way the theme is worked out is a bit more positive.  When Moses very eloquently tells Yahweh that he isn’t eloquent, Yahweh appoints Aaron to be Moses’s mouthpiece, and that situation is the model for what the prophets do for their Lord.  This is why the prophets so often declare, “Thus says the Lord.”  If they’re what John Madden calls “the real deal,” their words are not their own, but God’s, and they deliver them to the people.

It is essential to note, though, that there are two major aspects to prophecy.  Many people have deluded themselves into thinking that a prophet is just someone who foretells the future.  In fact, the criterion Yahweh gives for discerning whether a prophet is from him or is a phony is to have him predict an unlikely future event.  If it comes to pass, the prophet is real.  This appears to be the basis for one of Jonah’s gripes.  He has predicted that God will obliterate Nineveh, but he knows that if Nineveh repents God will relent.  Ergo, Jonah is viewed as a false prophet.

But just as important as the prophet’s role as foreteller is his role as forthteller, in which he tells the people what God wants them to know about the seriousness of their sin and what they should do about it in present time.

When we speak of the artist as prophet, we mean something of both roles is involved.  As forthteller, the artist shows us what is really going on in our societies, and as foreteller the same artist may give us a pretty good idea of what is coming.  One striking example is El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which on the surface appears to be the most Counter Reformation Catholic of paintings.  It shows the body of the count laid out in all its finery, and surrounding it are some of the greatest dignitaries of church and state.  On the

top, however, is the count’s soul, clad only in a loincloth, bowing before Christ as judge.  Traditional art critics have considered this one of the most important of all paintings in its ingenious and innovative melding of heaven and earth.

In recent times, however, it has been pointed out that the painting is subtly subversive of Counter Reformation Catholicism.  How?  It has two centers, two focal points.  This was the church’s issue with Copernicus and Galileo.  The earth-centered solar system was supposed to reflect the centeredness of the world in the papacy and the empire.  If the earth actually moves, and thus isn’t the center of the universe, then perhaps the papacy and the empire are in danger of being displaced as well.  See:  Luther and the Reformation.  And then there was Kepler, shouting out to the world that the planetary orbits aren’t even circular, for heaven’s sake (no pun intended).  So El Greco, deliberately or not, seems to have been giving us a symbol of a new way of being in the world, in which the observer can focus on more than one center.

In the same era, poised just before Descartes doubted everything right into a dustbin, stands Don Quixote, one foot firmly planted in the Medieval world view and the other stepping uncertainly into what would be Descartes’s new approach to epistemology.  Early on, this ambivalent Everyman lies defeated in a ditch and tells his neighbor that he knows very well who he is, but that he also knows he can be all sorts of heroes of the past.  You see, the latter part of his statement is right out of the Middle Ages, in which to reproduce the deeds of a hero is to become that hero.  The earlier part of his speech shows that he is not merely a psychotic.  The Cave of Montesinos episode, which turns out to be a dream, exposes in a thoroughly modern way the contents of his unconscious, his doubts as to whether he can really bring this thing off.  Even his idealized peasant lady love, Dulcinea, who is right out of the Platonic love tradition of the Middle Ages, shows her true vulgar colors in the dream as she asks him for a loan.

In the second part, Don Quixote stands undaunted in his hope that he can yet impose his will on objective reality.  He tells Sancho that two flocks of sheep raising a cloud of dust down below them

are two armies about to meet in a great battle he has read about.  Sancho cautions him that they are nothing but flocks of sheep, and the knight’s answer is startlingly close to what we would call postmodern; “I tell you, Sancho, and it is therefore true,” that those are the archetypal armies in question.  And he charges down the hill on Rocinante and spears some sheep, which he is then forced to pay for.  Probably no better example could be given of humankind poised between the ancient world, in which the truth or falsehood of a proposition is decided by an authority (in this case Don Quixote’s books), and the modern world, in which materialistic empiricism would reign.

In that sense, Don Quixote is both a forthteller, warning his generation that things were changing radically, like it or not, and a foreteller, illustrating the conundrums with which humankind would find itself confronted.  One critic remarked that all subsequent novels are only variations on Don Quixote.

Of course, the readers of this column will be able to add dozens of worthy examples of the artist as prophet following Don Quixote, for example Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son Maitre, in which the narrator presents an exciting scene portraying Jacques and his master with an angry mob in hot pursuit, only to inform the reader that it never happened.  That underscores the fact that fiction is only fiction, mocking the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”  Of course, philosophers and then physicists got into the act, Kant warning us of the limits of pure reason and Berkeley pointing out that we can’t prove anything or anyone exists outside our own perceptions.  Now physicists inform us that the moon is not there when no one is looking and, as one friend of mine put it, we feel like just going out and playing in the sandbox.

And, true to form, the artists are still forthtelling and foretelling.  The abstract expressionists seem to be warning us, “There is no referent to what I’m painting; its only subject is the paint in a

certain configuration on the canvas.  Sorry, but that’s all the reality you’re going to get.”  So much for art’s “holding a mirror up to nature.”  Of course, one is free to feel that such a painting is beautiful, but that’s all subjective.  It relates to our being told that the only truth is what works for an individual at any given moment.  No wonder Paul Tillich assured us, in The Courage to Be, that

the central anxiety of our times is that of emptiness and meaninglessness.

Perhaps we should pay more attention to what the true artists of our generation might be telling us.  It just might help us understand some highly important sociopolitical processes more than superficially.

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