Sabbatical Zones #3 – The Intellectual Zone

I’ve mentioned that my sabbatical needed to have a vocational element; since I’m a pastor and preacher that would involve some serious theological heavy-lifting, and that the area I was going to immerse myself in was an evangelical theology of the visual arts.

Now here’s the thing.  I spent the best part of five-and-a-half years in full-time theological education before I was ordained.  I’ve been ordained forty years this Christmas, and during that time I spent over a decade teaching in a seminary, and I’ve written around a dozen books.

In other words, reading theology in itself isn’t an intellectually taxing pursuit.  I mean, there are writers I find more complicated than others, and my Hebrew is (ahem) a tad rusty, but I’m familiar with the field, I know my way around, and if you drop me in a theological library I can find my way to the stacks.

I’d be among friends.

While I could handle the ‘evangelical theology‘ bit, the visual arts themselves were a whole new ball-game.

What I hadn’t considered, but what turned into an exhilarating and ongoing intellectual quest, is that while I could handle the evangelical theology bit, the visual arts themselves were a whole new ball-game.

I had to get my mind around the academic discipline of art history.  Knowing something about the general flow of things, not just the artists I liked, was going to be important. Could I tell a Poussin from a Claude? Filippo Lippi from Filippino Lippi? Early cubist Picasso from early cubist Braque?

Deep waters, Watson. Not always, not always, and I doubt if even they could sometimes.

Even at the most basic level, I had to get my Duchamps in a row.  (That’s an arty joke, of a sort. You’re supposed to smile knowingly).

Silliness aside, I had to read, look, read, and look again.

And that was the easy bit.

Because the second academic disciple is that of art criticism, or art theory. In other words, how do we talk intelligently about something which is as wordless as a painting?. Getting beyond ‘that’s a crucifixion’, or ‘that’s a still life’, and starting discover how one captures and puts down one’s responses to an artwork is a skill in itself.  

It’s a narrow knife edge, balanced between pretention and philistinism.

Have I learnt how to do this? Of course not!  But – and here’s the thing – the thrill is in the chase, the trying something different and difficult, learning a new intellectual language.

Now for you, that will probably look different. You might plunge your hand into the ‘one day I really want to understand…’ box and come up with infra- and supra-lapsarianism. Or Aramaic.  Reading Dostoevsky. Or which parts of being a pastor is helped by, or threatened by, AI.  Or – I don’t know – the off-side rule (except that compared to infralapsarianism, no-one can really understand off-side).

Just choose something engrossing and difficult.  And make your brain really work.  Your brain doesn’t need a rest, like a muscle.  It needs a fascinating challenge.

Process question:

If you’re planning a sabbatical, mini-sabbatical, quiet week or quiet day, what are the intellectual challenges you need to take with you, for a healthy time?

This was my first ever real sabbatical, and many of you will have had one too – what have I missed?