Of plaster statues & romantic heresy:
Lyon, John
PROVOCATIONS TO ICONOCLASM Of plaster statues & romantic heresy JOHN LYON ONE OF THE CHARACTERISTICS which certainly proves the soundness, vitality and indestructibility of the Roman Catholic...
...And that frivolity was raised exponentially by the frivolity associated with various para-liturgical cults and devotions: First Fridays, First Saturdays, Third Thursdays...
...Though still believing we are made in the image and the likeness of God, and that God became man and dwelt among us, we are yet coming to deprive ourselves more and more of the human image in church art...
...statuary of androgynous males and romantically prurient females (sort of piously attired "Barbarellas"), which are so corruptly displayed and confected as to suggest that they are really cast of sugar rather than plaster...
...The curse of death, and all that made it appropriately obscene, has been lifted...
...It was not my purpose in mentioning this piece to establish it as a canon, but simply to suggest that here was a work of art in which the artist had taken at least one primal reality of Christianity seriously...
...As is so often the case in such issues, it is much easier to specify what good church art is not, than to write prescriptions for what it should be...
...There is much that is elegant, exquisite, and impressive, and at times even things that are endearing if not classically harmonious, in Baroque and Rococo art...
...The question concerning which artistic conventions might be most appropriate in ecclesiastical art was eventually hammered out in the Orthodox church after a century of horrible internecine war and persecution, and left the Byzantine world and its derivative national churches (such as the Russian) with that form of ecclesiastical art which we call "icons": two-dimensional , highly stylized yet at times marvelously wrought and strangely individualized images of Christ and the saints...
...Sebastian so full of arrows as to look like a human porcupine, writhing in romantic agony...
...The crucified Christ in the center above the altar is flanked by a mourning Mary and a moderately inconsolable John, both in stagy poses dominated by hands clasped in supposed grief, and glances upward at the crucified...
...Even the performance of a piece of music otherwise "straight" may turn it into a romantic slough: Think of various performances you may have heard of Bach's "St...
...To borrow a line from the end of a Brendan Behan play, what romantic crucifixes and pietas, for instance, seem to be saying is: "O death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling...
...The problem of romantic unreality arises when one mistakes the conventions of the genre in which the representation is cast for reality...
...Are my ear and eye strangely uncoordinated...
...The law cannot discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate...
...There is something eye-catching if not attractive about the Rococo altarpieces...
...Few would propose Holbein's style as a model for today, or his"Dead Christ" as a paradigm for church art...
...That or nothing...
...only corrupt belief - and, incidentally, poor poetry, or art...
...Lest the secular and fictional character of this example detract from the argument being made, see Theresa of Avila's account of the same sort of corruption in her own early life...
...My mother, a pious Irish Catholic, and my father, who at that time was not many years removed from having been a generic Protestant, faced a certain dilemma about the disposal of the mutilated madonnas and disfigured disciples...
...It is not to be reveled in or dwelt upon, for that way still lies sadomasochistic prurience or romantic bathos...
...There is then no shame in death or disfigurement, and no necessary pornography in displaying them repre-sentationally...
...What he can demand is that we pour our whole Christian soul into its production, and not produce it and use it as an exercise in ersatz eroticism or worse...
...Fortunately, Paulinus's suggestion has not utterly dominated Christian aesthetics...
...Then look sometime at a reproduction of the head of Christ in Hans Holbein's painting, "The Dead Body of Christ in the Tomb," Rather, meditate on it...
...PROVOCATIONS TO ICONOCLASM Of plaster statues & romantic heresy JOHN LYON ONE OF THE CHARACTERISTICS which certainly proves the soundness, vitality and indestructibility of the Roman Catholic church is that she has survived her own iconography...
...Music can certainly bear the romantic overburden as well as graphic or plastic art can...
...The desire to suffer or see others suffer for suffering's sake may be rather common...
...that is, it is stagy, posed, imitating the emotions conventionally but authoritatively described in the novel (= "roman," the root of "romantic") rather than gleaned from the nature of the Christian experience...
...Think of the setting - a ballet - in which Tolstoy places the seduction of naive Natasha by the improbable Anatole in War and Peace...
...It is a permanent problem...
...However, the disappearance of the statues could also be taken as a sign of a general coming to disbelieve in saints, or a settling conviction of the frivolity of their cults...
...Iconoclasm literally means a "breaking of images...
...Iconography in a sacramental and incarnational order is of immense importance...
...In a conventional pose, of which it would be most interesting to learn the origin and channels of transmission, Christ's dead body "hangs" on the cross in what is almost an amusing manner...
...Gerard Majella will never look like the member of any grammar school or high school football team, and thus holy cards of him and others of his ilk (that is, those engaged in conspicuous consumption, or dying of tuberculosis in public) ought not ever have been distributed to pubescent boys as incentives to purity...
...Winifred's, its regular dressing providing some solace, one presumes, for those who yearn for an ecclesiastical equivalent of Barbie and Ken...
...World's loveliest - men's selves...
...Sulpice sometime early in the nineteenth century...
...485, 1161, 1162, 1164, 1178, 1261, 1268, 1269 #1, 1279, 1280, 1385, 1399), and in supplemental elocutions such as the Holy Office's June 30, 1952, "Instruction on Sacred Art" (AAS, 44-542...
...Whether what is happening is revitalization or simply another form of degeneration-or a mixture of both-we cannot change our inheritance...
...In the absence of such integrity and insight, what is produced is likely to be either the work of the incompetent for the unper-ceptive, or that of the prurient for the prurient...
...Shall Mary look like Aphrodite...
...That way we might produce from the roots of the Christian experience a few Holbeins and El Grecos...
...It must be protrayed as it is, then: dominionless, but still death...
...He's making love to her...
...The same can be said for pain and suffering...
...That would be a shame, if it were the case...
...In general, amateurism might be suggested...
...Broad and flappy banners droop about our altars today like wash on a Marrakesh clothes line, only without the pungency, color, and fittingness of the latter...
...And I find myself of two minds concerning the art of these periods...
...Whether or not the images are being broken in the Catholic churches of America I do not know...
...But this would be only a beginning...
...Disturbed by the Buddhist metaphysics implicit in Paulinus's suggestion, one thinks immediately of Hopkins's poem, "To What Serves Mortal Beauty...
...In an age when men would seem to worship banners as well as "block or barren stone," we need to remember that...
...Fati-mite eschatology, the Infant Jesus of Prague, Bingo...
...Off on a side altar, with no cupola of its own, stands a statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague, its cult not having been foreseen by the architects of St...
...Ideally, I suppose, it should be the precipitate of a deeply lived Christian life, produced by the mind and hands of a skilled craftsman...
...But the thought is alluring, isn't it...
...Something she has imbibed then allows her to fixate on images such as that of the engorged Sacred Heart, or the sickly lamb, or the pastelled (and presumably perfumed) Jesus: A sort of Hollywood Christ, who of course had his armpits shaved before the crucifixion so as not to give offense to anyone, or detract from the display of his musculature...
...It was not living, not the self-motivated action of the free man who has his principles within his own breast...
...Goethe called his autobiography Poetry and Truth...
...John like Apollo...
...The closest we have come to such a struggle may have been the iconoclasm associated with the Protestant Reformation...
...Severa's martyrdom...
...If there is any truth in Blake's suggestion that we become what we behold, then such abominable graphic art and statuary ought to be destroyed...
...It is hard to know what to recommend to harried pastors and all those devoted religious and lay people who have genuine concerns in the area of church or liturgical art...
...Out of the disproportion between these capabilities and desires arises the allure of the unreal in the only form it can take - existential angst, self-imposed love of suffering, love and suffering...
...The hip-to-one-side pose of the dead body of Christ seems to be anatomically akin to that pose so teasingly taken by seated women with short skirts who place their hands over their knees...
...art...
...Romantic love (and its conventions) means the application of the consciousness of human insufficiency to ascend the ladder of love as an excuse for not moving up it in purposeful pain, and means instead a reveling in purposeless, nihilistic pain...
...But these are treacherous grounds, for it might be suggested that the Christian message is a romance...
...Christ isn't bloody with death...
...He had taken the truth of his life, much of it caustic, and turned it into poetry...
...The law is written to prevent the worst, not to encourage the best...
...A basic response would be, Try to understand and observe the spirit of pronouncements concerning sacred art such as those in the Code of Canon Law (i.e., Nos...
...The banners, inscribed with Gospel messages or those of some latter-day prophet (e.g., Kahlil Gibran), are almost always devoid of representational JOHN lyon is an associate professor in the liberal studies program at the University of Notre Dame...
...That was perverse...
...That Christ is dead...
...Indeed, what role should human beauty play in the representational art of the Christian dispensation...
...Rationality and a proper perception of the dimensions of her situation come and go in Natasha's mind as her desire to experience what she has not known is pandered to by Helene (Anatole's sister), the conventions of the stage, the social, moral, and aesthetic irresponsibility of Russian high society, and, of course, Anatole himself...
...Matthew's Passion...
...What is utterly distressing is that they house here, as in so many other churches, some of the most atrocious and abominable statuary ever cast...
...As I look back on the episode, it was the unnatural poses of, and the imbecilic expressions on, those stereotyped stalagmites that have remained with me...
...One end of the church is crammed to overflowing with a marble altar and two side altars, upon and around which rise in Rococo splendor intricately wrought wooden altarpieces...
...And into the vacuum created by the removal of statues and paintings from our churches has moved the processional and stationary standard...
...If our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and if Christ, being God, did not hesitate to take on our flesh and take that flesh to and through its cyclic return to dust, then we owe more attention to our church art than we have been willing to pay...
...The squiggle-hipped body of the crucified suggests a certain unreality about the crucifixion...
...6-7) WHAT is meretricious in romanticism is the allure of the unreal which is set before us, whether it be in writing, in graphic or plastic art, or in music...
...As condign punishment for our previous poor taste in representational art we face a generation or two of droopy pennants...
...On the surface of it, the appeal of such art appears to be trite, or cute, or "sweet," or "pious"-in a sense Aeneas never knew...
...The outstanding result of the martyrdom to the young maiden's physiognomy, however, as displayed in our enshrined representation, was a six-inch long gash in her neck...
...Come, violate me," or "Come, be violated with me...
...But, it is still death...
...We must have and be the experience of the truth of our belief before we can turn it into genuine "poetry" - or painting, or sculpture...
...At this point it is sufficient to propose that what romanticism does is to try to transform real human suffering into an illusion on the representational (artistic) level so that it can be "enjoyed" in a peculiarly corrupt manner on the mental or spiritual and perhaps eventually even physical level...
...The entire romantic genre seems to play on this suffering, destructive, nihilistic urge, but it plays on it surreptitiously, subconsciously, sub-liminally, for a straightforward admission of what forces were at work would be intolerable...
...paintings of a St...
...It was rather the slavish imitation of authoritative literary convention on the part of those who were without much experience of life and who perhaps could not even conceive of what living meant in the absence of some external authority to tell them how to live...
...Perhaps a certain gnosticism lurks here...
...Let us turn the truth of our lives into the poetry of our art, and not borrow our truth from artistic conventions or ecclesiastical tradition, no matter how imposing the authority of such convention or tradition may be in its origin or expression...
...Instead of knees buckled or splayed and hips straight, as would presumably be the anatomical result of hanging by one's hands with one's feet fixed, the knees are semi-rigid, and there is a highly conventionalized squiggle or off-set position of the hips-vaguely reminiscent of the pose typically taken by an overfed, underworked, and dreadfully bored teen-age girl while waiting for a soft icecream cone...
...And those who think they have been may be living a romantic heresy in the bosom of the church...
...But suffering and death have not been physically transformed...
...Reflecting on it briefly here may be of some service to us in our present difficulties...
...I was about six years old when we moved into that house, and it was no minor trauma, I fear, to have been introduced to that chamber of banal plaster horrors at such an impressionable age...
...It has of course been argued that, in romantic love, love is in fact the love of death, the erotic desire for annihilation...
...That starkness would perhaps be unbearable...
...Good church art requires the use of the imagination disciplined by meditation on the "good news" if it is to produce appropriate images of the Word made flesh and of the sacramental order his Spirit informs...
...I am not sure of the ultimate cause of this discrepancy, but I think I know one of the proximate causes of it...
...On the sly, she drags herself through the bathos and melodrama of numerous romantic novels while at a convent school...
...instead, it is often an argument against sanctity and belief...
...There is and presumably always has been a serious problem in the creation of a Christian iconography, a problem analogous to that faced by any religion to which images are allowed by the dispensation of its divinities...
...There was much that was frivolous in the cults of the saints, no doubt...
...WE vacation periodically in a small town in the Midwest...
...Fortunately for all save Draculian droogs or latter-day suc-cubi, I have forgotten the story behind St...
...Self flashes off frame and face...
...Autobiography of St...
...It is their hearts and souls which must be moved, so that they may faithfully, gracefully and appropriately enforce those general provisions of the law, such as those of canon 1279 (#3), which specify that "The Ordinary shall never permit, in churches or other sacred places, the exposition of images [paintings, statues, pictures, medals] which convey false dogmatic notions, which do not conform to good taste or the canons of propriety, or which may be an occasion of dangerous error for the unlearned...
...It is part of the purpose of this essay to suggest that what must here be loosely called "romantic" church art works on our aesthetic sensibilities through a seduction to nothingness on a deeply subliminal or subconscious level...
...Good art is not something one can get by simply demanding it...
...The West, for good or ill, has had no "Iconoclastic Controversy" to match that of the Byzantine Empire in the eighth and ninth centuries...
...Death no longer has domination...
...Among his readers he noted that some had taken his "poetry" (e.g., The Sorrows of the Young Werther and its romantic-suicidal hero) and turned it into the truth of their lives...
...I have irregularly taken students "on pilgrimage" to the Shrine of St...
...Common or not, it is perverse...
...This wasn't really God become man who died here but a semi-divinity, transfixed and transposed in his apparent moment of romantic agony...
...They are useful for the purposes of this essay because they are so utterly typical of Catholic church art in America over the past century...
...It does so by establishing conventions, e.g., in the novel or hagiography, in which an impossible but alluring distance is established between human capabilities and human desires...
...He who made us in his image and likeness and loved what he had made so much that he dwelt among us, could hardly ask that we avoid representational art...
...This might be taken as a sign of a largely unconscious awareness of the blight which they have spread, which awareness in its turn would be a sign of revitalization in the church and a certain indication of the work of the Holy Spirit...
...and it wasn't their disfigurement that impressed me when I did think of them...
...The "romantic" performances, in addition presumably to changing Bach's instrumentation and orchestration, seem to tend to allow the performers to dwell on phrases such as the last words of Christ, so that "I thirst" and "It is consummated" sound as much like the utterance of someone in the throes of sheer (though stagy) sexual passion as they do like the utterances of a dying man...
...Neither the town nor the church is so named...
...THE PROBLEM of what good church art consists in is obviously a very serious one, one not to be settled in articles of this sort, one filled with the most substantial consequences for the liturgical life of the church and the spiritual life of individuals...
...That typical representational positioning of Christ's body upon the cross illustrates the worst and most dangerous characteristic of what perhaps ought to be called "romantic church art...
...But the cost of such amateurism, that is, the regular employment of local artists, might be exorbitant...
...In fact, in the absence of the explanatory caption attached to the glass case, one would perhaps think that one had here the representation of a young victim of a pyorrheal vampire, or a toothless but tough-gummed werewolf...
...It is not pleasant to think of the Christian mind running through the endless ruts of whatever sort of contemporary variations on arabesques we might produce . Filagree work betrays the pedigree of sons and daughters of God...
...It served the bourgeoisie as a means of relieving its secular boredom by the viewing of, and thus vicariously partaking in, various forms of imagined sexual seduction, athleticism, and perversion (viz., the innumerable seraglio scenes, massacres, disasters, etc...
...Mirabile dictu, the last time we went, the statue had been clothed in fine garments, with a high collar appropriately covering the gash in her neck...
...Essentially, her sentimental education has left Emma with a cheap imitation of the romantic streben nach dem unend-lichen, an imitation which puts demands on life which life can never fulfill, while asking of the romantic searcher less than life demands...
...But this would be a mistake...
...And, anyway, it relieves the boredom...
...Self flashes off frame and face...
...Perhaps...
...Winifred's is a well-kept and exteriorly handsome red-brick church, somewhere between Basilica, Romanesque, and Gothic styles in design...
...That Protestant iconoclasm, with its destruction of statues, stained-glass windows, paintings, emblems and other ecclesiastical adornments, has surely been of consequence in the history of the art and architecture of Western Christianity...
...The resurrection isn't necessary, for death is just an illusion, a stagy convention, a trompe I'oeil...
...These elaborations rise in niche upon niche, cupola upon cupola, housing various statues and emblems in their grotesque (i.e., grotto-like) sinuosities...
...Lily-bearing St...
...The corpse is laid out on a slab, gray with death...
...Think of that sort of crucifix, or the traditional pieta, a la Michelangelo, with its superficial portrayal of grief and its substantial display of anatomy...
...I am generally attracted to its music, but repelled by its graphic and plastic art...
...It often seems that such art as this essay addresses has its tap root not in the fertile soil of experience but in the sterile surrogate medium of authority, artistic and ecclesiastical...
...The unreality of romanticism is not the unreality of sheer fantasy, of course...
...Let's call it Springville, and its Catholic church St...
...Yet statuary and graphic art are not at the center of the liturgical functions, and perhaps for a while they ought to remain literally peripheral, until we are graced by artists who can, through their good work, lead us to a re-appropriation of the deepest roots of our iconographic heritage...
...Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is that we will all slowly and carefully and prayerfully work through the function of mortal beauty in the divine economy, and in doing so come to a more adequate appreciation of the role of church art in general, and of the human image in worship in particular...
...Everything in the church building ought to help lead us to worship most fully...
...The corpus is robust, athletic, showing few of the rigors of the crucifixion and its antecedent horrors...
...That frivolity has turned on us with a vengeance...
...I can't say I ever dreamed of those creepy things down in the basement...
...In the absence of such willingness we might appear to be better off moving toward the iconoclasm God enjoined on the Jews, and which the Muslims later adopted...
...Fortunately, rather than painting them pink or blue and rotating them serially through a shrine made of an old bath tub stood on end and partially sunk in the ground, they decided to pulverize them with a hammer and use the resultant fragments as fertilizer for the garden soil, which was-we hoped-low in calcium...
...Something similar might be said of much church art...
...The natural erotic impulse which should lead us up with and through nature to a rapt vision and beatific dance about the ever living source of our being is easily displaced along the way...
...LEST this POINT seem to be over-made, consider the following...
...Emma dotes on the imagery of God as the celestial lover, and tries to mix up promiscuously the emotions she has undergone in sexual ecstasy with those she imagines she should have while taking the Eucharist...
...and they should strictly forbid that a hoard of statues and images of little worth, mostly of a stereotyped form, be inanely and awkwardly presented for the veneration of the faithful on the altars themselves or against the adjoining walls of the chapel...
...It is indeed the statues in their grottoes which are troubling...
...These lines come to mind, in which the poet, speaking of beauty, says: "See: it does this: keeps warm/Men's wits to the things that are...
...Here, the "eternal feminine that leads us on" is no Virgin Mother, but a devouring seductrix...
...This genre is exemplified, I am afraid, by the glass-encased reclining plaster replica of St...
...Let a hundred flowers bloom...
...When we moved in, the basement was filled with "factory seconds," as it were, of these pestilential images: one-winged angels, noseless Josephs, partially dismembered disciples...
...Winifred's...
...Legalism or a legalistic approach might only compound the problem as we see it, for it necessarily emphasizes the letter, and not the spirit...
...We are doing this, perhaps, out of revulsion bred by reflection on our own insipid productions of the past few centuries...
...it is a strangely suppurated yet "clean" incision, such as one imagines might be left by a monstrous and infected leech...
...More about how that seduction to nothingness works will be suggested as we proceed...
...And it is precisely the problem of analogy: representations of beati and divi must be somewhat the same as representations of ordinary men and women, yet somehow different...
...I'm just playing...
...They are vintage plaster, from molds that must have been designed at St...
...The didactic purposes to which ecclesiastical or hagiog-raphical art is to be put present peculiar problems, of course...
...The custodians of our church art are becoming aware of the Chamber of Horrors over which they preside, I must report...
...I am told a local artist perpetrated it...
...It must have been like being shown a room of images of former victims of some ecclesiastical Dracula or Bluebeard cast by a spastic Madame Tussaud...
...Severa for purely pedagogical reasons...
...Though experience teaches lessons which are at times too dear, an art based primarily on authority can be immensely corrupting...
...Thus her corruption...
...but they certainly have been disappearing over the past generation...
...This suggests that a sort of iconoclasm has, perhaps unconsciously, taken possession of the Catholic mind in America...
...When life does not satiate her passions, she steps in to help it, turning her lover Leon into her mistress, seducing him instead of him her...
...Now there is certainly a real and primary sense in which death and physical injury and mutilation are shameful things...
...hell for conversation...
...Baroque churches and the Baroque spirit seem to have given a natural purchase to romantic graphic and plastic art...
...There is no "romance" here...
...Think of the strange, sly amalgam of sexual libido, the desire to suffer, and Catholic liturgical ritual that seems to be characteristic of Wagner's Parsifal...
...One source of her corruption seems to have lain in the extravagance of her sentimental education (as opposed to an education of the sentiments, which could be a good thing...
...It is the alliance of the erotic desire for eternal life with the spirit of death and destruction, the mis-identification of fulfillment with annihilation...
...The irony or paradox in the Christian message, however, ("to the Greeks folly, and to the Jews a stumbling block") requires a kind of integrity and insight in the execution of artistic representations and in their beholding that is rare...
...but, upon reflection: "I don't really mean it...
...If we proceed in the opposite direction, moving from what the authority of code or convention tells us is genuine poetry or painting or sculpture, we shall produce in all probability only corrupt belief - and, incidentally, poor poetry, or art...
...Any of my contemporaries know the sort of art I refer to: holy cards sporting the most peculiar looking men and women...
...Again, as the same instruction insists, we should see to it that those preparing for holy orders receive adequate instruction in sacred art, and that diocesan commissions for sacred art are composed of those who are "competent in the field of art but also firm in their allegiance to the Christian faith...
...Bad art is not a problem of the past alone...
...The downfall of the romantic lies in confusing the conventional and the real under the influence of a desire to suffer or see suffering done...
...Theresa of Avila [New York: Columbus Press, 191 l],pp...
...Gauguin wrote of the annual Paris display of art in the nineteenth century that "the salon [was] an enormous brothel...
...Consider in this connection the rather plausible argument made by Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary as to the means by which Emma Bovary became so shockingly corrupt...
...Those who administer it can...
...That such was the state of one's God-become-man-rather than that of a jaded "gay" athlete posing for a Palestinian center-fold-is a sobering reflection...
...The fashion for feckless representational art having passed, however, what is to be feared is that we are drifting artlessly into other feckless fashions: The fashion for non-representational art, and the fashion for a certain kind of banner-bearing: sticky felt on floppy felt...
...In Christianity this problem can be seen as part of the larger issue allusively sketched out in Tertullian's rhetorical question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the academy with the church . . .?" What have the canons of classical art to say to church artists...
...This appears to be the ambiguity which characterized Emma Bovary's bogus spirituality...
...Art ought to be an aid to worship...
...But one way of putting the Christian message is that Christ has taken death captive, and carried bodily decay and disfigurement on high...
...THE HOUSE in which I grew up in Chicago had been owned before us by a family whose breadwinner worked for a large statuary company which provided all the Rose of Limas, Bernadettes and Francis de Saleses for half the Midwest...
...The latter, for instance, citing Canon 1279, reminds us that "the Ordinaries should see to it that whatever is in any way contrary to the holiness of the place and the reverence due to the house of God be removed from sacred buildings...
...The immediate message conveyed by such a pose is: "Life is so boring...
...it's all just a play for our therapeutic catharsis...
...Severa under a side altar in the main church on the campus of my university, Notre Dame...
...There is a mural of the Last Supper behind the altar of our parish church which looks for all the world like a portrayal of "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs...
...For the first time in the history of human art, perhaps, the portrayal of suffering and death has become possible without the necessary suspicion of perversion...
...To have grown up Catholic anytime during these last two or three hundred years has meant to have had a good chance that one's religious life would be inundated with graphic and plastic art which at its best could be described as sappy, in the middle of its range as pandering to pruriency, and at its worst as outrightly solicitous of responses in which sexual libido and sado-masochism are promiscuously mixed...
...The insistence on simplicity of style in Lutheran, Calvinist, and Baptist churches, for instance, seems to have played a role in driving Roman Catholic church architects and artists into those fits of frenzied extravagance, generally known in the history of art as "Baroque" and "Rococo" styles...
...and crucifixes on which the dead Christ's hips have an "engaging" offset...
...Why is this so...
...It seems as if, to paraphrase a familiar sentiment of Acton's, "Authority tends to corrupt, and absolute authority corrupts absolutely...
...WHAT IS to be done...
...If heaven is filled with the sappy sort of creatures our art suggests - well, then, as that bit of believer's galgenhumor has it: "Heaven for climate...
...One does not have to have grown up prior to the Second Vatican Council to have been beset by bad church art...
...Or recall Emma Bovary's fingernails gouging into the plush velvet box rail at the Rouen Opera during a performance of, again, a ballet ("Lucia di Lammermoor"), while she silences her husband Charles's question as to why the male lead is torturing his female partner with the hissed exclamation: "Shut up...
...Our love, that is, in a fallen though redeemed world, can come to be attached to or associated with other sources than life...
...There is a certain sort of church art which might be alluded to here, and might best be described as Transylvanian kitsch...
...To continue with the argument of Hopkins's poem, "To What Serves Mortal Beauty,": To man, that needs would worship block or barren stone, Our love says: Love what are love's worthiest, were all known...
...and pornography is literally the writing about shameful things (or the drawing of them, by slight extension of the term...
...Is not all earthly beauty a snare to entrap the unwary, a lotus, the eating of which makes the Christian forget his own country, which is God, as Paulinus of Nola suggested...
...and the more adequate role of beauty in an integrally sacramental order proposed to us there...
...It has to do with perversions of a later period in the history of Western art, the "Romantic Era...
...In our church art, Christ may reign from the cross as the Byzantine Pantocrator, or he may hang in agony on it, or he may be presented to us in numerous other appropriate forms...
...What is revolting about so much representative church art since the seventeenth century is that it is romantic...
...Josephs, who look less likely to have handled a saw than Oscar Wilde did, ought not to have added the pallor of their vintage plaster to our churches...
...But the provocations to iconoclasm have been regular and serious over the past centuries...
...Oh, the plaster gash oozes no gore...
Vol. 110 • March 1983 • No. 6
