On Catholic Art Part II

I recently read a book, by Josep Pearce, entitled 'Literary Converts'. An excellent read that I highly recommend, it is about that wave of 20th Century English converts to Catholicism that include such great names as Chesterton, Benson, Knox, Waugh and even Wilde. Oscar Wilde it was that said 'the Catholic Church is the church for both Saints and sinners, for perfectly respectable people Anglicanism will do'. What strikes one in reading the conversion accounts and about the draw of the Catholic Church is that those great literary figures, those weavers of words of wonder, were primarily attracted to the Church by her beauty. A church of saints and sinners she was to them far from mundane, prosaic or even merely respectable but in fact sublime and wonderful. True, those 'literary converts' had to then go on to discover its truth (and many of them became great apologists for that truth) but, first, their emotions were stirred not by clear clever arguments but by beauty. By Catholic Beauty I am not here just talking about Gothic Architecture or Baroque Painting, nor do I mean merely Classical Chant and Divine Liturgy, but the whole Catholic thing (as it was in England at that time): priests, monks and nuns dedicated to God, congregations on their knees, Saints, Martyrs, feasts and fasts, all in harmony, culturally rich, a delight of dreams. Into this, on top of this and as part of this, reflecting, breathing conjuring up and signifying this entire cultural feeling where the visual arts of the Catholic Church.

Who does not walk into a Gothic, Romanesque, Byzantine, or baroque Church and know – this is special, this is where something wonderful takes place, this is the home of devotion and heart felt beauty. My point here is to say that beauty has as much place in salvation as truth. For it is beauty, true beauty in Christ Crucified that draw one with devotion to the Church. I you want community you join a tennis club is you want to worship God you turn to that which is given to the worship of God – the sublime, the beautiful!

The cross of Christ Crucified is the height of our experience of beauty.
Our faith is not a purely apophatic one. While we cannot make idols to experience the one true God, the Word made flesh communicates God to us in image and form. When we meditate it is not as the Buddhists do, separating ourselves from all that is sensate. No, we use our God given imagination. In the Benedictine tradition, reflecting on the divine word, or, with St Dominic, thumbing our beads we ponder the mysteries, or, like St Ignatius, we put ourselves in the Gospel stories and in the words of St John of the Cross 'we allow God to lead us up that dark mountain' where we experience Him through what he has revealed. God reveals God's self to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We do not make an idol of a great unknown nothing and white wash our walls to express it.

As we are all aware, all of are naturally attracted to various things, many of them that are not of God. Natural religions (those without the light of revelation) often seek to purge the spiritual life in order to find God beyond the beyond, away from all that is. When really God is not beyond our created world, but indeed, behind it. God is the source of all things, truth, goodness, beauty and even being itself. Moreover, God, in the person of Jesus Christ, has chosen to speak of himself. And so, instead of turning to the world, which is not God, or turning away from the world, which is not God either, we need to 'convert'[ from the world to God. God wants to speak to us and be seen by us and so God has created a world precisely in which He can express himself, a world of images and likenesses in which we, creative and symbol making, are the crescendo and Jesus the summit there-of.

Of course, while keeping this in mind we should remember the old axiom lex crdendi lex orandi – the law/rule of belief is the law/rule of prayer. That is to say: who believe God to be determines how we approach Him and the image/concept of God that we approach is who or what we really (in practise) believe God to be. We are only deceiving ourselves if we say anything other about God than that which we imagine in our prayer life. Thus (getting back to the visual arts) any use of images should be determined by our understanding of the one to whom we are turning our attention. By this I do not just mean image of Jesus or Gospel stories but any use of the arts. Images of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of Angles, of Saints, the images created by music or evoked by the use of language all impacts of how we experience God, especially when used in worship. And indeed, any lack of the use of image (be that visual, musical, liturgical or even the liturgical action) does not have a neutral effect on our relationship with God, but taints it all the same.