Framing Marvellous
Creation Story One: 1:1-2:4a
Creation is our backdrop, then, and mighty pretty it is too. Put another way, it’s our story frame, which nicely leads us to Chesterton’s celebrated comment in Orthodoxy:
Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame… the artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing.1
.jpg){kind=link}
At first, it might seem counter-intuitive that the essence of, say, Caravaggio’s wild and mesmerising horsy jumble that is the The Conversion of St Paul is the frame, but, of course, Big G’s referring to the literal context of all art, or, if you will, its conditions of possibility. Put simply: no frame, no content. This is the curious liberation of constraint. After all, even a chaotically complex Pollock relies upon four simple sides.
Following GK’s freight of thought: in creating, God somehow wilfully self-limited. It’s quite hard to know what is or isn’t impossible for an infinite being but it’s a little easier for us to recognise a paradox when it presents. And this enormous mystery is right there before us from the outset of Genesis, caught between our two simple words: God created.
One of the thematic preoccupations of Genesis One is creation by separation or division. Here, then, is the first and most fundamental separation, or we might say distinction: between God and his creation. God is infinite, uncreated, unlimited; creation is finite, contingent, limited. They don’t mix. Creation comes out of God but isn’t God. You don’t reduce an artist to their art. No graven images of the Most High, please, they’ll never do Him justice; they’ll always be created out of something created, never uncreated.
But, God still created.
He clearly didn’t create out of any need or lack in Himself. And, there’s obviously no limiting infinity. Except Chesterton, the Prince of Paradox, is surely still right. About humans and about God. God created a frame and because He’s everywhere He’s now also inside the frame He’s created. He’s not technically bound by that frame, the canvas, or for our purposes, the narrative arc but, nonetheless, it’s His story, He’s the author, and if He truly loves it, then, (as Maritain implies), He has to enter into it, care about it deeply and all its characters, even suffer for it and be faithful to His vision of that story from the very first word unto the last… even if it kills Him.
Long before postmodernism was ever a twinkle in the Modernist eye, God, in Jesus, bypassed the frame and literally entered His own story in order to save all the characters therein. In so doing, He transformed story forever.
Header image: Angèle Kamp, Unsplash
Collected Works, Vol I, Ignatius Press, 1986, San Fran, p 243