This Talk about Art
Attwater, Donald
311 THIS TALK ABOUT ART By DONALD ATTWATER THE Church has always been the mother of the arts. Reduced from its oratorical form to the limitations of historical fact, this statement means that...
...We have no reason to believe that churchmen were any more exigent in their requirements then than now...
...For example, we are building houses of concrete: why not our churches of concrete...
...art is the layman's job and when we say that Prior Conrad built the choir of Canterbury Cathedral we only mean that he was responsible for the work being undertaken and for paying for it...
...The art of Christian men as exemplified in western Europe derived its qualities from a complex of influences energizing over generations to produce a certain civilization, a certain organization of society, a certain philosophy, of which the heart and the soul was the Christian revelation, and which permeated the minds and lives of men irrespective of their personal relation to the Church (just as today it is not uncommon to meet a French or Italian atheist or anti-clerical libertine who is essentially more Catholic-minded than many a good, pious, moral English Catholic...
...What, then, becomes of Christian art...
...We have been hypnotized by the doings of the middle-ages...
...In other words, in the ordinary accepted meaning of the phrase, the Church was not, and never has been, "the mother of the arts...
...Gothic, Norman, Byzantine, are dead and gone, outmoded, the manifestations of earlier and different days and places...
...By conducting technical schools or academies of art...
...She mothered the arts by buying the work of the artists (to use our modern word...
...The Church was not responsible for the good quality of the work in her churches and her children's homes from the fourth to the sixteenth century (any more than for the bad work now) but she was responsible for the quantity...
...For her business is to save the souls of men, which is certainly not the business of art...
...Why should she...
...By drawing up codes of practice...
...By preaching aesthetic ideals or talking about the service of the artist to the community or words to that effect...
...She wanted cathedrals, churches, statues, embroideries, paintings, books, hinges, nuts, bolts, bars, locks, fastenings and all the rest of it, for the manifold purposes of Christian worship and ecclesiastical life...
...In France particularly at least the beginnings of an alive, distinctive, up-to-date, unecclesiastical art of Christian men may be seen which is manifesting itself especially in churches built of concrete, steel and glass, planned, decorated, lighted in twentieth-century ways...
...there was no artistic world of Chelsea, Greenwich Village, or anywhere else then...
...Obscurantism...
...They bought what was for sale—as they do still...
...Belloc to the contrary notwithstanding...
...but for all that we must not picture these carvers as poring over the Bible and religious treatises: all that we know of their training and surroundings contradicts any such idea...
...The stations of the cross are the job of a carver who refuses to work in any style...
...Why are the children of the living Church content to produce only a dead art...
...and if the scholastic part were concerned with Christian theology and philosophy and the history of the rise and fall of peoples...
...Apart from certain unimportant Byzantine features, the building is an honest structure of brick, concrete and metal, built by ordinary workmen in the ordinary twentieth-century way (complete down to a strike of bricklayers for more pay) and deserving all the praise that has been given to it...
...But they have to admit that those stations are one of the chief art events (and probably the most important yet) of this century...
...as Mile...
...Take one example, church buildings...
...Reduced from its oratorical form to the limitations of historical fact, this statement means that for a long time during which Christianity governed the minds of men in Europe and hither Asia, the practitioners of the fine and useful arts were all turning out work varying in quality from the superb to the mediocre, and only rarely and accidentally bad...
...we should raise...
...Mediaevalism...
...or if a carver in Bourges had been told to do a scheme of Byzantine decoration...
...And these are the work not, I need hardly say, of firms of ecclesiastical artists, but of artists who are indifferent to antiquarianism, who have a job to do and do it in what seems to them the best possible way here and now...
...There is the culture of Catholic men and the art of Catholic men...
...Not on being "a good Catholic" as we understand it...
...Particularly not on ecclesiastical interests or "churchiness...
...The only difference is the quality of what is for sale...
...And the art of Catholic men is simply art that has certain qualities (as has the art of Muslims or of Rajputs) : one of the distinguishing qualities was that it was "the art of man redeemed" (Maritain) and this it was that caused the best art of Catholic men to be the best art the world has ever known...
...Louise LefrancoisPillion has said recently of the sculptures of Reims: These works are bound to Christian dogma, to the Church's mind interpreted by her teachers, by roots as firm as those which bind a plant to the soil which nourishes it...
...And they are doing it...
...Westminster Cathedral is a good object-lesson...
...a distinctive ecclesiastical style is an absurd superstition which started in the Protestant, commercialized England of the nineteenth century and was part of its divorce of religion from all the rest of life, except sexual morals...
...Who dare deny it or dare try to explain it, cumbered with the premise that the Church is the mother of the arts...
...She bought the work of the artists, not to encourage the arts (that idea came in with the prelate patrons of the Renaissance) but because she required the goods...
...In France, in Spain, in Catholic parts of the Reich, architects and other artists and the churchmen who employ them are seeing that the skill of Christian men can and should be employed in those methods of building and decoration which are most fitted to the available materials and actual conditions of today...
...And it must be 312 remembered that in the middle-ages all men were not assiduous frequenters of the sacraments or even of Sunday Mass...
...On what did these qualities depend...
...Then, as now, work as good as, and sometimes better than, that done by Christian men was being done in other parts of the world by people who had never heard of the Catholic Church...
...Can we imagine what a builder of the fifteenth century would have said if asked to build a church with round arches and beak-head moundings, Norman, in fact...
...now— if you know a good thing from a bad one—you must still buy with your eyes shut, or you will probably not buy at all...
...if, moreover, the school were situated outside the orbit of influence of that after-Christianity which lies like a blight over the intellectual life of English-speaking countries—preferably France, still the intellectual centre of Europe...
...In Catholic countries this is beginning to be recognized...
...we have worked ourselves into a feverish state of irrelevant ethical complacency about Gothic architecture and have organized a jargon of technicalities about "styles" to enable us the more easily to classify museum specimens and make to ourselves churches whose ways of building and forms of decoration are simply borrowed from our ancestors...
...Then you could buy with your eyes shut, in the sure and certain hope that you would get a good article...
...In Great Britain and the United States we Catholics are living, whether we like it or not, in a civilization and organization of society which owes its peculiarities to the un-Catholic renaissance and the anti-Catholic reformation...
...when first put up they were greeted with derision and indignation by practically all English Catholics, who still regard them with suspicion and dislike...
...But that is no reason why, in this matter of art, we should go puddling about with the past and conditions which no longer obtain, instead of getting our common-sense Catholic philosophy to work on the new conditions...
...How did the Church mother, how was she responsible for, this state of affairs...
...The shortest answer is that there is no such thing as a specifically Christian art any more than there is a single Catholic culture (Mr...
...We cannot get away from it...
...By laying down canons of art...
...As for a Catholic school of art: art schools have been one of the most potent influences in the degradation to which the arts have been brought...
...The Church mothered the arts simply by being a colossal consumer—as she is still...
...Good morals have never been a sine qua non of good art any more than they have of good engineering...
...Still less on being a cleric...
...Thirteenth-century churches were built in just the same way as thirteenthcentury houses...
...Just as in 1400 Norman was dead and gone, outmoded, the manifestation of an earlier and different day, so in 1929 in Great Britain and America, Jacobean, neo-classical...
...Since the renaissance and the reformation these qualities have been decreased, in some lands to vanishing point...
...But such a school might be most valuable to English and American Catholics on certain conditions: e.g., if the art teaching were confined to instruction in how to handle and use the various tools—brushes, gravers, chisels, what-not...
...Their business was simply to translate into solid shapes the ideas that had been given to them...
...If it were suggested that we should follow a similar course in any other human activity, what howls of "Reactionary...
...The decoration, sham Byzantine carvings, arty ornaments, stylized mosaics, is dull as ditch water and dead as mutton...
Vol. 10 • July 1929 • No. 12
