Artistocracy and the Church

...Well, I might recommend Mr...

...Ask any Catholic what has happened to the Gregorian chant in our time, and you will be met with blank stares...

...writers of genius, although a severely limited genius, who voice the tortured souls of modern men who lost their way and who returned through strange paths and from stranger places to the city of God...

...Wright comes down to modern times we get a sketch of the romantic revival with Chateaubriand at its head, a few words about the Oxford Movement, a page and a half about the Vatican Council, a brief chapter on modernism, in which the Church is condemned for its condemnation of that movement, four pages about the war, written from the point of view of an exasperated pacifist who cannot understand why the Pope did not condemn the whole business, and a somewhat longer chapter with the amazing rubric of The Catholic Church in America...

...Orage permitted the coined term to stand...

...They scorn teachers, preachers, priests, governors, who, they say, all have failed...

...A few words, however, before I pass on to other aspects of Mr...

...it is a voice speaking out of his own heart...

...Even an amateur in the subject of Catholic church history—and few can be other than amateurs in that field: for consider the tremendous bulk of the subject matter, its multifarious ramifications, its literature in all civilized languages—can readily perceive the futility of Mr...

...He is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last...

...Art and the search after it, art and its enjoyment and its appreciation, art as the spirit that if yielded to and obeyed will alleviate human misery more efficaciously than anything else— this art, they proclaim, should and will be recognized as the one sure evidence of whatever divinity there may happen to be...

...The others are such authors as Salomon Reinach, Alfred Loisy, Dean Inge, Adolph Harnack, G. P. Fisher, and other quite modern writers—modern also in the sense of being modernists when they are not Protestants or non-Christians...

...The Church has reawakened from a lethargy produced by the wounds of the Reformation, the French Revolution, and all the storm and stress of the modern industrial and materialistic epoch which followed...

...Men and women seeking God, but entranced by one...

...Wright are such men as Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Huysmans, writers who at their best only represent the byways and sometimes the morasses of life and literature...

...It is really a work of art...

...And in the very last words of that moving and eloquent last chapter he really ceases to be what I have termed him, and what he actually is through the bulk of his curious volume, namely, the affected and rather self-conscious artistocrat...

...Even as art, it is all very petty...

...and perhaps also with him who desires to believe, who sees far off the heavenly lights of the Church to which he may never attain, who after all his wanderings has not yet reached home...

...Wright as a critic of modern Catholicism seems not to know really what is going on...

...And more and more these men and women are becoming conscious of each other and of each other's efforts...

...It is a personal document, at times written with a high degree of moving beauty...

...It has an interest, and a value, quite apart from its absurd claim to consideration as history...

...His strictures upon the ugliness, the machine-made quality, the stupidity of so much of Catholic architecture, church decorations, church music, would be quite just, and really are less severe than the judgment passed by many qualified Catholics themselves, provided only that he seemed to know of the reaction against this ugliness and mediocrity, and of the notable success which the reaction has already earned, and all the multiplying signs of its advancing strength and authority...

...Wright tells us that "if the thirteenth century is ultimately great, it is not because it was conspicuously happy for all its sacerdotal splendor...

...The Story of the Catholic Church, by Cuthbert Wright...

...Wright did not himself profess to be writing a history...

...Wright might well retort, nobody could expect a complete history of the Catholic Church...

...Wright, or barely mentioned, would be to write a book at least as long as his own...

...2.50...

...Wright's book is one more proof of it...

...it is because it produced a great Catholic art under the impetus received from a religious renaissance...

...Here we come to the real interest, indeed the true value of the singular book, which at this point I abandon to the historians, if they deem it worth their while seriously to examine its claims as history...

...For example, he gives us a bibliography...

...It seems to me Mr...

...Wright's book, considered as history...

...And it is— if Mr...

...The only Catholic writers that seem in the slightest to interest Mr...

...Perhaps all this would not so much matter if Mr...

...Wright's chapter on the art of the Church and many other passages of his book throughout positively glorify the Church's function in inspiring, fructifying and patronizing art, and while in a large measure he is correct in criticizing the decline of that influence in modern times, yet even on this latter ground he proves himself unequipped with adequate knowledge of his subject...

...There is no controlling the blurb writer, of course, so it would be time wasted to make any comment whatsoever upon the enormity of the first sentence of this quotation...

...Of course, in one volume, as Mr...

...It is 72 THE COMMONWEAL November 24, 1926 the confession of a soul which has been strangely moved by faith—who believes in Christ, who believes also that Christ must have founded a Church, indefectible, indestructible, absolutely authoritative...

...In one word, Mr...

...Today I think even more strongly that it is a valid one...

...Monasticism is explained solely as a movement resulting from the determination of the only intelligent people of the early days to "escape from life," and who became monks because their "religion forbade them to commit suicide...

...Wright might have paid attention to the list of Popes prepared by those who probably are in a position, if any historians can be, to state the matter correctly, namely, Catholic church historians themselves...

...Years ago, in the columns of the New Age, when that modern knight-errant of many spiritual quests, Mr...

...who seems at times to be almost panic-stricken by the suspicion that there is indeed such a Church, and that its centre is in Rome, but who dreams vaguely such dreams as have haunted many shadow hunters since the days of the Gnostics down to our own time, the dream of a "church within a church and also beyond it, a hidden and secret church of the initiate, a church of the spirit...

...Cuthbert Wright and put forth as a history of the Catholic Church—although its title is less pretentious—all that need be said concerning the book's shortcomings, either as a history or as a narrative of its subject, will be said by those more competent to deal with the matter than the present writer...

...When Mr...

...Wright to put that question to Mrs...

...Justine Ward, or to visit the school of Gregorian music at Manhat-tanville in New York, or to visit any one of at least a dozen dioceses in the United States where Gregorian music and the music of Palestrina are being revived correctly, beautifully, and spiritually...

...To make a list of the many vastly important social, intellectual, and mystical movements either entirely ignored by Mr...

...It is true that there exists a list placing Clement before Linus and Anacletus, but surely Mr...

...admittedly an excellent writer, but where are Lingard, Gasquet, Belloc, and many others who might be named...

...Cuthbert Wright is one of these artistocrats, and that his book is one of the most notable examples of the artistocratic attitude toward life...

...While Mr...

...In one place in his book, Mr...

...Wright does not seem to have heard of such standard historians of the Church as Baronius, the Bollandists, Muratori, Mohler, Hergenrother, Janssen, Grisar, Ludwig von Pastor, Goyau, to name a few modern Catholic historians at random...

...New York: Albert and Charles Boni...

...Quite the best chapter in his book is, Of Art and the Church —although many of the best paragraphs even in that interesting chapter seem hardly more than an English paraphrase of Huysmans, in En Route, and La Cathedrale...

...of the most fascinating of His shadows, the shadow of the beauty created by architects, painters, sculptors, composers, singers, players, dancers, in all the many forms of art, have in these our bewildered modern days tended more and more to see in art the prime hope of mankind, its chief and most serious business, the standard by which all human efforts should be measured, the thing, or the spirit, that should be at once man's ideal life, his way and his goal...

...Wright deems to be hostile toward the development of art...

...Whether men welcome the fact or repel it, or seek to deny it, the fact is patent, and Mr...

...Like the mother of Francois Villon in the ballade, we know nothing but this, 'and in this faith, we wish to live and die.' He can do nothing for those who say 'they have need of nothing, and know not that they are wretched and miserable and blind and naked.' It is rather with the poor and unpretentious and disinherited of life that He delighted Himself when He was with us in the world...

...His publishers less modestly say that "all previous histories of the Catholic Church have been written either by biased pens of theologians or by the equally biased pens of the freethinkers...

...Here for the first time appears a book which combines sympathy with frankness, and interprets the religious standard both of the artist and the ordinary man...

...To themselves they seem to be the superior ones...

...Something like a Church of Art is being built by a thousand scattered spirits throughout the world, and toward it many, many thousands of other men and women are turning...

...Wright states that Saint Clement of Rome was the second Pope...

...Wright ignores all the great mystics, philosophers, theologians, and, with one exception, Saint Francis, all the great religious and social reformers of the mediaeval period, a period which even today in the United States is being studied by experts in sociology, science, economics, as well as art and literature, in a score of different directions, all of them profitable to those who would not blindly return to the middle-ages, but who would utilize the vital principles which made the thirteenth century great, not only in art, but in many other phases of life which are of prime importance to mankind, despite the contemptuous attitude of the artistocrats...

...He seems to know nothing, at least he says nothing, about the many notable if as yet isolated and scattered developments of originality in Catholic church architecture, in sculpture and in painting, in literature and philosophy, and above all, in the field where he displays the most indignation against what he terms the mediocrity and ugliness of modern Catholicity, namely, liturgical music...

...Wright will not be irritated by this propagandist use of his beautiful chapter—it is also a proof of a thesis fundamental to The Commonweal, namely, that Christ and His Church more and more claim the attention and the interest of modern men, particularly the young...

...Through all the world the banners of the Church advance...

...After a few words concerning the Jesuit and Franciscan missions in Lower California and along the Great Lakes, and a few more concerning the Catholics of Maryland, a paragraph about Father Hecker, and a bare mention of the late Cardinal Gibbons, Mr...

...It is even worth while to have written a bad book in order that it might end with something so good...

...Wright's concluding chapter, in which he tells November 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 73 us he speaks for himself, although in truth every paragraph in his book is saturated with subjectivism, is exquisitely written, and with its contrast between the "pagan rout" which he attended in New York on Christmas Eve and the midnight Mass to which he later went, it is literature, and it is something else, something more and better even than literature...

...Three or four of them are Catholics...

...The history of the Church is all I can undertake at this time," he says modestly...

...For he says that "This book began with Jesus, and must end with Him...

...Wright, pausing only to shake a finger of mild deprecation at the Ku Klux Klan, gives the rest of his space to an attack upon a priest because of a single statement made in a sermon, or an address, we are not told which, during the war, and a very much longer attack upon those whom Mr...

...In his first statement, Mr...

...Yes, for even artistocracy, on these terms, can be included, with all other interests, and all sorts and conditions of men, in the Catholic Church...

...Wright's book which interest me more than its value or lack of value as history, should properly be said in order to justify what is written above...

...For example, in dealing with the mediaeval period, Mr...

...But it is as so complete a history that it appears to its publishers as superior to "all previous histories of the Catholic Church," that the book is put forward...

...Seventeen authors are listed...

...A. R. Orage, was its editor, I wrote something to the effect that a new cult was springing up which might be termed "artistocracy...

...The only Catholic authority quoted in the bibliography who is concerned with England, which is so radically vital to the understanding of Christendom and its splitting up in the Reformation, is Monsignor Bernard Ward...