On Catholic Art Part I

We have all heard it said before: ‘the best way to preach is by example’, or ‘ the best apologies for the faith are the saints themselves’. In a certain sense, what the Catholic artist is called to do is akin to that of the saint, that is ‘make, by analogy, other Christs’. Artists, and indeed Catholic Artists, co-creators with God, are given a special task of capturing and showing the form of beauty. The Saint does this with his or her life. The artist (weather painter, poet, song writer or other) should strive to do this also through their work.

It seems that this goal, showing forth the beauty of God, was, in yester-century, more to the artists (and indeed art critics) mind than it is today. Yet, today there is even more need for beautiful art. We live in a visual, symbol-oriented age. From advertising billboards and magazine racks to the ‘icons’ on our computers, we know that one thing can represent, speak and indeed capture the form of another. The only step further in this creative speaking by analogy would be to make the thing actually effect and truly be that which it signifies. Of course that would take the direct intervention of God who gives each created thing it nature. That is precisely what a sacrament is. Sacraments gain their nature through Jesus Christ who is the full revelation of God and (and because) he is God. God uses forms and things to speek of Himself and yet we seldom (these days at least) use the arts to speak of God. Even our liturgies have become wordish and boorish (I once heard the modern mass described as ‘one person after another talking at you through a microphone’) and most unlike the Saints who speak to the heart. Like the Saints Catholic artists needs to re-find ways of stirring the viewers emotions and singing of God, not with just stale dry words but with beauty and imagination!

Jesus Christ is loved, in part, because he captures our imagination. Moreover, with Christ the whole human person is redeemed. That means your heart, your love, your joy and your imagination as been sanctified in Christs having of a human heart, love joy and imagination.
Any sound epistemology must bring us to the conclusion that the imagination is an intrinsic aspect of the intellect and not something to be escaped. Nor should we want to escape it, as the Buddhists do, for it brings us such delight. St Thomas Aquinas describes it as an essential power for allowing us to understand all things.
It is clear that for the intellect to understand actually, not only when it acquires fresh knowledge, but also when it uses knowledge already acquired, there is need for the act of the imagination (ST Ia, 84, 7)

As we cannot posses things in themselves in our minds (neither God nor any material object nor anything extrinsic to us, save the emotion for which they stir) we need to imagine factually. Rather than turning to the thing itself (which cannot be in our mind of itself) we turn to phantasms of that which we are to understand. So, even when grasping things in truth (as they really are) we are using images – phantasms – the imagination.

And so God gives us imaginative ways in understanding and experiencing him. None more importantly that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass where we can see our Lord Jesus Christ’s entire life death and resurrection played out in signs and symbols and ultimately taste and consume His very real presence. So let us take a cue from God and strive to make the mundane of this world beautiful in art to say the least of that which is already sacred, our churches and chapples and places and things of worship.