The Art & Theology of Novelty

Artists and designers love novelty. It is not just the novelty of creating a new thing, but they want the substance, the content of the work to be new as well. And while the conservative impulse is to look askance, to dislike this lust for novelty, properly understood, novelty is good. But to be more precise, we need to balance or have both novelty, antiquity, and consistency. In this essay, we are going to explore the nature and art of novelty.

We have two impulses: a desire for new things and a desire for old things. Regarding old things, we trace genealogies. We want “something old” in our wedding. We love our parents and grandparents. We read history. The philosopher Hannah Arendt says, “Everyone’s a conservative until the day after the revolution.” That is, even if you want the toppling over of the current system, the day after you get it, you will be a conservative because you will want to conserve that new order. Or in the slightly tongue-in-cheek words of Joseph Bottum, he can sum up his conservative philosophy in one phrase: “Change is bad.”

Yet we also want something new. In a wedding, there is something old, something new, and something blue—which I don’t entirely understand—but we also like new books and new movies. Every day we wake up, and it is a new day. So novelty is actually written into the structure of the world. Novelty is literally an ontologically unavoidable feature of temporality.

How, then, do we understand and harmonize these two impulses and realities?

The Nature of Novelty

Well, let’s look at the nature of novelty. What do we mean when we talk about novelty?

The novelty we seek is not just newness, but newness plus goodness. It is a journey, progressive revelation. If the new thing were a bad thing, it would not satisfy our desire for novelty. Second, there are levels to the meaning, the nature, and the ontology of novelty. Let’s look at novelty first in creation, and then in God’s nature.

First, novelty is inherent in the nature of creation. Creation contains novelty in both its spatial and temporal dimensions. Because creation is spatial, or spatially extended, every location is novel. This location does not have something that is in that other location. This sidewalk is different from that sidewalk over there. Even if they are visually identical, they will always have slight differences. They are different in their location and different in their relationships. This sidewalk is a certain distance from the mailbox, which is different from the other one.

Second, consider temporal novelty. Every new time or moment has never existed before. The arrow of time flows in one direction, so every moment in time is intrinsically new. Novelty is built into the very structure of creation.

Continuity in Creation

But so is the other side of novelty. What you call it is a little tricky to pin down, but it could be called oldness, history, tradition, or consistency: something that has already existed, a repetition, things that persist through each novelty. This, too, is intrinsic to creation.

Spatially, for any place or object to exist, it must have many things in common with other things. For instance, take a pen sitting on a table. It obeys the same laws of logic as other locations. The law of non-contradiction of necessity must obtain for this to be a pen and not an elephant, and to be this pen and not that pen over there. The same physical laws must apply in this location as well as that location. It shares chemical similarities and atomic and subatomic characteristics with other objects. It has formal similarities to other objects—it possesses the form of a pen.

We could list a thousand more aspects. Even though all of these specific characteristics do not necessarily need to obtain, many of them must. If none of them did, it would be ontologically impossible for that object to exist, because it would be in every aspect of its existence wholly other and unlike any other thing in existence.

Or take temporality. While every moment is new, it is interpenetrated by the past. The present is literally composed of the past. The present can be understood as a variation on the theme of the past. Aside from what was created ex nihilo, everything that currently exists existed in the past. It is both a new thing and an old thing. We are history, artifacts, living relics persisting through time.

Creation, therefore, is ontologically and necessarily both old and new.

Novelty and Consistency in God

Why is this? Why novelty and antiquity?

Novelty and consistency are intrinsic to God’s nature. God’s consistency is the more obvious of these attributes. It is evidenced explicitly by declarations that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, as well as being implied by other attributes like righteousness and chesed—his covenant-keeping love and loyalty. These all require a consistent character whom we and the world can rely upon.

God’s novelty, however, is a bit more of a novelty to many people. Before we unfold this, we must remind ourselves of one proposition, one presupposition of all our talk about God: our speech is always analogical. When we describe God as holy, there are both similarities and differences to what we mean when “holy” is applied to God and when it is applied to man.

This becomes clearer when we use more concrete metaphors for God, like when we describe him as a rock or a fortress. We all understand that those words mean quite different things when applied to different objects. And so it is with God’s novelty. His novelty is not the emergence of an entirely new aspect of his being that previously did not exist. But if all of creation is revelatory of God—if it shows God—then there is some analogy that is the divine source of the reality and experience of novelty.

We can understand this divine source when we understand the central ontological truth about God’s nature: God’s nature is not absolute stasis or inactivity, but precisely the opposite—absolute activity. What we normally and more precisely call love.

David Bentley Hart describes it in this way:

God’s infinitely accomplished life of love is that trinitarian movement of his being that is infinitely determinate as determinacy towards the other and so an indestructible actus purus endlessly more dynamic than any mere motion of change could ever be.

God’s nature is mirrored in creation as a continuous unfolding of a marvelous fabric expressive of God’s transcendent abundance. Novelty is the earthly image of the eternal divine dynamism of love.

It is also the necessary function of finitude. God’s eternality and immensity necessarily entail novelty in creation because creation is finite. There will always be more ontological unfolding of the divine nature possible. While an obsession with novelty is sometimes interpreted as anti-creational, every novelty is an implicit trumpeting of both God’s dynamic fullness of life and the world’s finite nature—a confession of the ontological abundance of reality that ought to be unfolded.

The defilement of novelty occurs when a pure novelty is sought: a novelty without consistency, a naked novelty, novelty for its own sake. This is idolatry. Even the most purely novel act, creation ex nihilo, was not pure novelty, because creation came forth as a sign of its author. It is a piece of art infused with the structure and style of its artist, perfectly consistent with his nature.

Theme and Variation

This is something that all great artists know. Great art is always a theme and variations on that theme. In music, there is a melody or a theme that is then permuted through the rest of the piece.

Graphic design and branding are always a balancing act: creating a new piece that retains brand consistency while meeting the demands of communication—say, an announcement of a meeting with its specific details—and at the same time avoiding cliché and the boring, pure repetition of previous graphic pieces.

Indeed, this is one of the most fundamental patterns of life in all its forms. We eat three meals a day, and we attempt to retain some sort of consistency regarding the quantity of food and the quality of macronutrients. But at the same time, we strive and yearn for variety: new types of food, new flavors, new ingredients. So it is with our speech, with our relationship with our spouse, and in how we spend time with our children: a consistent dynamism of novelty and consistency.

David Bentley Hart discusses Jesus’s baptism, when the Father calls out from heaven that Jesus is his Son with whom he is well pleased. He notes that it reveals God as perichoresis. It also shows him to be the God whose life of reciprocal giving away and containing is also a kind of dancing. When Scripture says “God is love,” after all, this is certainly not some vague sentiment concerning the presence of God in our emotions, but describes the life of God, the dynamism of his substance: the distance and dance, the unity and coherence, but also the interval of appraisal, address, recognition, and pleasure.

Or as Peter Leithart says:

The life of God is God. And that life is the life of three persons. It is a life of generation and procession. A life of eternal communion. That life is justice, holiness, wisdom, power, goodness, and truth. All actualized in the infinitely mobile, infinitely lively, inexhaustibly energetic life of triune love. All actualized in relation to a contingent creation.

Watch the original episode.