Reflections upon Art

...Beauty was recognized as the best that could be seen, heard or created, art as the best way of doing a beautiful thing...

...With them came their concomitant, mysticism, the transcending of the intellectual measure and the test of rational experience, by a higher power of assent...

...This unfortunate and misleading episode can be considered no more than this...

...The relationship of Catholicism—the religion and philosophy and way of life—to art is a very different matter...

...Modernism" tried logically to correct this, to create an art that fitted a technological, materialistic, despiritualized society, and in a way it succeeded...

...Councils and synods have found their concern in other and more obvious duties and considerations...

...With the renaissance all this was changed, and from the fifteenth century on we have the modern era (not of course "modernism...

...Over all and through all, however, was the energizing and directing force of the Catholic religion and while the forms of the arts were taking shape largely as the result of the operation of the above-named forces, it was the universal religion that was determining the content, the indwelling spirit, and inevitably molding material elements to its will...

...Today we use the intellect and the fruits of the intellect for the attainment of material ends...

...The last century has seen an almost complete transformation in society, in its mechanism, the tools with which it works, and in its motives, its mental processes and even its ethical standards...

...The French churches to which I refer are not only offensive to the Catholic spirit and manifestly hideous, they are also laughable, and ridicule often destroys where instinct and reason cannot correct...

...Everything that conditions life today, in its material aspect, all those things that have made possible an amazing technological civilization, are the product of a space of time within the memory of men not yet eighty years old...

...More than thirty years ago in England the lead of the Established Church was followed and as soon as Roman Catholic churches were needed and could be built, they came into existence and of as high a degree of excellence as held in the case of their Anglican rivals...

...For example the earlier American skyscrapers took the general form of a mediaeval church tower, of incredible dimensions, and were overlaid with "Gothic" detail produced by mechanical means...

...What it did was to accept the arts as they then stood, give them a new content, give them little by little new and ever-changing forms, give them finally a new work to do in that they became almost sacramental in character and were called upon to play their part in the symbolical expression of the loftiest and most tenuous spiritual values, and the communication of these among men...

...So long as this religion was both vigorous and pervasive, the art it transformed was never at rest...

...The only parallel to the ceaseless and creative activity that showed itself in the evolution of Christian art from the sixth to the sixteenth century is our contemporary technological development, but while there is similarity in nature there is diversity in impulse and motive...

...Certainly this great transformation should show itself through an adequate art, but as a matter of fact it did not for a very long period, and the old forms were used in the clumsiest sort of way, being arbitrarily imposed on an alien and unsympathetic base...

...All the arts of the late nineteenth century except music were retrospective, archaeological—romanticist, preRaphaelite, neo-Gothic—and the attempt at an artistic revival after the sterility of the preceding century found itself involved in an almost complete artificiality...

...Christian art from Constantine to Lorenzo de Medici is so exactly the child and the counterpart of the Catholic religion in its various vicissitudes that it is almost true to say that it is a coordinate and indispensable part thereof...

...It can hardly be said that the other arts have followed suit in any comparable degree, the right sort of religious painting and sculpture being still far to seek, though stained glass has long held a high place and metal work, wood-carving and embroidery as well...

...This is one element, but one only, and that by no means the most important...

...Being the witness of revealed truth and the one continuous force in the midst of whirling eddies of chance and change, it can go only to a certain limit in its acceptance of whims and fashions...

...Its natural expression was through color, including shadow and darkness, and their contrast with ever-contending light...

...Beauty was gratefully accepted as a very special gift of God, and art was fostered because it somehow, and mysteriously, glorified material things so that they seemed less unworthy to offer to God, and because it furnished a new and eloquent language for the expression and communication of spiritual truths, and was vastly useful in spreading and enforcing the Catholic faith...

...For fifteen centuries Christianity and Catholicism were synonymous terms, for the schism of the eastern patriarchates effected only a severance of administrations...

...Art was not a thing apart, in a category by itself, it was a necessary part of life, a thing accepted as instinctively as eating and sleeping, fighting and love...

...It represents the personal idiosyncrasy of an individual priest here and there and cannot be interpreted as expressing in any degree the tendency of the Catholic Church...

...It was quite on a level with current Methodist and Baptist practice, in some respects even worse, since the opportunities were greater, while the justification that could be urged in the case of Protestant work could not hold here...

...This was particularly true of religion, and above all of Catholicism, for very evident reasons...

...The reconstruction of the world is almost as complete as that which took place cataclysmically and in a strange secrecy some four thousand years before the Christian era, drawing a line of demarkation between Neolithic man and the man of the historic period...

...Here we find so close a linking that to all intents the two almost become one...

...As Christian art was one of the greatest of arts it was for a thousand years almost without self-consciousness, and the Church accepted and used it—and therefore fostered it—in the same sense...

...The Catholic faith rests on an immovable basis, it is not subject to the changes and vicissitudes of human society, however patient it may be of folly and weakness and unwisdom...

...It belonged to everybody, a sort of "natural right"—more solidly based and more easily defended as such than some other devices that have borne the name in later times...

...Jazz music, futurism in painting, cubism in sculpture, modernism in architecture, free verse—all these things relate themselves to contemporary life, and nowhere more intimately than in their severance from all precedent, their denial of any fundamental law, and their essential ugliness...

...The attempt is being made to force this by the protagonists of modern art, particularly in France, and in a few cases they have achieved the cooperation of the ecclesiastical authorities...

...for the religion that seized upon and used them was a religion of spiritual, of transcendental values, and the intellectual form of pagan art could not, of its very nature, operate adequately for expression or evocation...

...At first these aesthetic qualities out of the Orient assumed a dominance over the exquisite and perfect form of the West, and naturally...

...Hitherto in the art of Egypt and of Greece beauty in line and form, together with the sacrificial factor of laborious and perfect manual craftsmanship, had been used, when employed for religious ends, to express symbolically the majesty and the superhuman quality of the high gods and their celestial regimen...

...It is so vicious a principle, so irrational in theory and so repellent in its results that we need, I think, have little fear that it will continue more than for a very brief space of time...

...Thirty years ago, Catholic art in this country was at the lowest level ever achieved in any time or place...

...From the date of the emancipation of the Church under Constantine, A. D. 311, the Catholic religion took over the existing arts, smote them into its very body and soul, and began its great work of transforming them into its own spiritual image...

...There are a halfdozen churches in France, a few in Germany and thus far one only in the United States which are couched in this explicitly anti-Christian style, while in painting, sculpture, stained glass and metal work the infiltration has been more insidious and pervasive...

...No bishop took the faintest interest in the matter, no priest, no member of any religious order...

...The material side of life experienced no very drastic changes, achieved no very important accessions between the reign of Nebuchadnezzar and that of Queen Victoria...

...the religion, except in point of a few dogmatic details, remained the same...

...It does not interrupt the steady progress in the recovery of good and significant art that is increasingly evident in England, some parts of Scandinavia and particularly in the United States...

...then they strove by the use of the sensuous to achieve the supersensuous...

...The weak point in the whole thing 122 THE COMMONWEAL June 5, 1929 was the assumption that there were no values existing other than the new ones created by modernist society...

...Neither the Dorian invasions, the fall of Rome, the renaissance nor the French Revolution have marked essential transformations in society comparable with what has happened in our own time...

...Its art, which is its visible manifestation, may be Constantinian Byzantine, Lombard, Romanesque, Norman, Gothic, Renaissance, depending on race, temper, inclination of its adherents, but in its essentials, its fundamental principles, it is always the same...

...The transformation in character was revolutionary...

...To use the forms of Catholic art, however distorted and desecrated, to express what we know as modernism, is foolish and illogical, but to use the forms of modernist art to express the Catholic faith is not only foolish and illogical, it is sacrilegious as well...

...While in Canada the worst traditions and practices still largely obtain, partly because of the French affiliations of the Church (no French architect for three centuries has had the faintest idea what constituted the art of Christianity) in the United States, Catholic architecture, largely at the instigation of men like John Comes and C. D. Maginnis (both Catholics) has taken almost the foremost place, certainly comparable with that of the Episcopal Church which for so long stood in the lead, and the Presbyterian, which has recently shown the highest ideals and demanded the best results...

...The appeal was in a way intellectual rather than emotional, the art expressive rather than evocative...

...There was no such thing as an "artist" in the modern sense of the term...

...Moreover, many members of the hierarchy, together with innumerable priests and members of religious orders, now take the keenest interest in all matters pertaining to Christian art, and while here, as in England, the other arts lag behind architecture, the demand for these has made itself audible and there are signs that they may shortly develop...

...This was largely due, from a professional standpoint, to three great Catholic architects, Bentley, Stokes and Sir Giles Scott...

...William of Volpiano and Abbot Suger and William of Wykeham were just as good architects as Eudes of Montreuil or William of Sens or Juan Gil de Hontanon...

...Whether it was architecture, painting, sculpture, the artist crafts, music or ceremonial it was all irredeemably bad, and the worst of the situation was that apparently no one cared...

...Style followed style, one merging into another in the neverending search for the attainment of the undefined by uncomprehended and ever-changing roads...

...120 THE COMMONWEAL June 5, 1929 REFLECTIONS UPON ART By RALPH ADAMS CRAM IN ITS function as an organism, the Catholic Church has concerned itself directly with art only to a minor degree...

...This is why it can have no part in the modernist art of the time, which has cut the cord of continuity that reached unbroken from the art of 3000 B. c. through to the early renaissance, and, though with raveling threads and weakening strands, down to only a generation or two ago...

...Apparently they all liked what they got and thought it good...

...Pure beauty, the beauty of a Greek vase or statue, was no longer so passionately sought, nor at first was perfection of workmanship so essential a desideratum...

...the Van Eycks accepted a contract to paint the statues on a town hall as cheerfully as an order for an altar-piece, and Cimabue wrought a majestas as instinctively as his successor today turns out the cover for a popular magazine, an advertisement of an automobile or a piece of still life...

...Hitherto, the West had been controlled by mind and will, the true land of reason and age of reason, and form was the inevitable and perfect expression of this quality...

...There is no more an "economic basis" for the growth and determination of Christian art than there is for human history...

...the creators of the architecture, painting, sculpture of the Christian centuries were good craftsmen with the universal innate sense of beauty, a more or less unconscious apprehension of spiritual values and a capacity for expressing them symbolically superior to that possessed by their fellows...

...Beginning in Syria, Anatolia and Armenia it moved westward through Byzantium to Italy, then by diverging roads into Spain, France and the Rhineland until it reached its term in Ireland, England, Scandinavia and Russia...

...A generation has seen an amazing change...

...Inherited artistic tradition and the vestiges of old centuries, the bent of racial stocks, climatic conditions and material circumstances all played their part in the great transformation, while social, economic, commercial and political evolution was working always as a constant and conditioning influence...

...Only in most recent years have Popes or other members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy issued admonitions or instructions in aesthetic matters, while it has been left to secular, and generally infidel philosophers to essay a definition of beauty and of art and to analyze the methods of artistic operation...

...Now, under the vitalizing influence of the Catholic sacramental system, the quality that, in its relationship to man, distinguished the Christian religion from all others, more than in any other instance, the arts absolutely changed their character, or rather added an entirely new function to those they already possessed...

...The East, on the other hand, Asia with its highest development in Persia, and adjacent lands impinging on the frontiers of the Roman empire, was the land of emotion, mystical and transcendental in its spirit, amorphous in form and method...

...Here it is possible only to touch on the high spots, for the process lasted over a period of nearly a thousand years, involving the work of many races, and showing itself in every one of the many arts of man...

...Already out of the East had come to imperial Rome, and especially to Alexandria and Antioch, color and June 5, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 121 perhaps also the beginnings of a new music, with all they implied of direct emotional appeal...

...Presently, as we shall see, much of pure form was recovered and in the end the two spirits of West and East achieved a complete synthesis, the result being the perfected art-expression of Christianity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries...

...But up to then art was simply doing things beautifully and therefore as well as possible, and the Church as an organic entity concerned itself no more with the theory and the philosophy of art, or with its furtherance as an independent profession, than it did with the theory and practice and furtherance of any other of the numerous factors which are essential to human existence...

...In the United States the recovery is more striking because it is the result of so brief a space of time, while its achievements are equally great...

...The old values, existing regardless of temporal change, and from time immemorial, home, education, religion, these things and many others besides, were ignored as vital factors, with their own laws, their lasting traditions, their demand for a different artistic expression, and the attempt was made to involve them in an art, so to speak, which, however intimately it might relate itself to the new technological society, had nothing whatever to do with them...

...There is no more fascinating study than this of the consistent weaving of a new vesture for the Catholic faith out of the indestructible warp and woof of an elder art: the change and enrichment of an old language to fit new concepts and give them to the world...