The World

After examining Macmillan's St John Passion in light of a Johannine theology, I decided that it was almost pointless asking whether the piece could be called "Johannine". A large part of the paper addresses the "Johanniness", but it is in looking at the work from an artistic point of view that I feel like I found the real theological value of the piece. Rowan William's Grace and Necessity led me to see the work through a philosophy of artistic integrity, rather than a systematic approach that reduces the work to a theological text, which it is certainly not. Williams's vision in Grace and Necessity utilizes the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Maritain and gives examples of such philosophy manifested in the work of the painter/poet David Jones and writer Flannery O'Connor. Utilizing Jones and O'Connor as prime examples of Christian artists that employ an uncompromising artistic integrity that is completely honest about the world that they inhabit, Williams offers an aesthetic of transcendence that is "intensely serious, unconsoling, and unafraid of the complexity of a world that the secularist too might recognize." The Christian artist working with integrity allows the world to be itself, something that may or may not be what we think it is. By looking honestly at the world in all of its joy, tragedy, violence, and banality, the Christian artist reflects the world as it is loved by God. Also, it is by engaging with the concreteness of the incarnation, including the complexity, brutality, and tragedy of the cross, that the artist witnesses to the severe, shattering, and subversive love of God made fully visible as he goes to the cross. Over against Arvo Part's "Passio", which is work rooted in pure transcendence and simplicity, I have argued that Macmillan's St John Passion is a work that confronts and embraces the given world, provides an honest and engaging look perspective of the cross, and witnesses to the full scope of God's action through the incarnation. By allowing the conflict and resolution inherent in the Passion narrative to work itself out, Macmillan has written a piece of music that runs 'with the grain of the universe', with the love of God that has infiltrated and interrupted our world, witnessing to God's radical transformative power and subversive action.