The Illustrated Jesus through the Centuries
Fete, Joseph
traception? "When there is reliable evidence that the faithful are simply ignoring a stricture of the church, the loy alist reposes his hopes in the possibility that at some point in the...
...Yet what the church confesses about the divinity and humanity of the person of Christ is most preciously distilled in its liturgies...
...The book closes in exultation, however...
...Here and there come flashes of scorn for expected topics like identity and gender politics, and multicultural curricula...
...Neil Coughlan is a lawyer in Connecticut and the author of Young John Dewey...
...To Buckley, the world's our oyster...
...In a composite icon Basil the Great is identified...
...What is Buckley's Catholicism not...
...Drink in this elixir from the Liturgy of John Chrysostom: "When your body was in the tomb, and your soul in hell, when you were in paradise with the thieL you were at the same time, O Christ, as God, upon your throne with the Father and the Holy Spirit, infinite and filling all things...
...Andrew Kimbrell invokes "a sacramental vision," calling for a total halt to "desacralizing technology," especially as applied to the human body--by fighting in the courts and legislatures...
...In a chapter that recounts the monumental contribution to theology by Augustine of Hippo, this bishop and teacher is pictured with Gregory the Great...
...When there is reliable evidence that the faithful are simply ignoring a stricture of the church, the loy alist reposes his hopes in the possibility that at some point in the future a pope will modify the reasoning of Pope Paul...or else that the principle being urged captures the moral imagination of the next generation of men and women, who will then abide by it...
...But unlike the more established figures he names, most of the younger writers he recommends will be scarcely known to readers...
...It is accessible to anyone...
...The illustrated Jesus is actually an expansion or visual supplement to Pelikan's well-received 1985 Jesus through the Centuries...
...Buckley might want to rethink the reflex individualism of his Catholicism...
...The ceremony is a statement and celebration of the radical transfiguration that the Roman Catholic priesthood is, its profound distance from the lay state and, indeed, from other Catholic religious vocations...
...Jacques Maritain, in works like True Humanism (1938), sought to preserve "Christian civilization" while upholding the dignity of workers in an enlightened capitalism...
...In this regard, Whittaker Chambers, and even the Thomas Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain, are not his bedfellows...
...thanks to Christ and the church and the sacraments, salvation is there to be had...
...No scholar who offered an interpretation of an ancient civilization based exclusively on literary evidence would be taken seriously...
...Wolfe is correct that the taboo against "religion" in the secular media has been relaxed in recent years...
...Glenn Tinder asks whether a responsible pluralism, still based on the "dignity and equality" of persons, could survive "if Christianity declines during the coming decades...
...Indeed, Pelikan advises the reader to return to the "text edition" for more complete exposition and documentation...
...He says this is because his natural discourse is argumentative, not devotional...
...1982), Richard Rodriguez--by now perhaps one of the most iiffluential Catholic commentators in this country--speaks, bleakly and movingly, of the liturgy as "a community of those who share with each other only the experience of standing alone before God...
...Happily, the graphic art that has replaced so much of Pelikan's 1985 text gives broader ground for this sort of theological reflection...
...There is little of Pascal's terror before God...
...Frederica MathewesGreen proposes the shared idea of "a world without abortion...
...It is not dark...
...We are also reminded that some images are less conducive to theological insight than others...
...I do not like to think what would become of a church that did not have Buckley's patrician, cerebral Catholicism in it...
...His own special interest is with the Christian imagination as conveyed by reflective and "literary" writers...
...and on the other, "secular" liberals, who have a parasitic relationship to traditional religion...
...Inevitably, though, this is for relatively few of us...
...And antitechnology utopianism reaches its apex in an essay by Wendell Berry, who defends a biblical enviromentalism and attacks both "the industrialist's contempt or hatred for nature" and modern "organized Commonweal | 8 March 13, 1998...
...but who are the other mesmerizing figures...
...He is working with The Judicial Evaluation Institute for Economic Issues in Washincton D C THEOLOGY GETS GRAPHIC Joseph Fete s the phenomenal success of last y e a r ' s "Glory of Byzantium" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art attests, religious art continues to exert a powerful attraction even in a secular age...
...But there are some pressing topics addressed in a few essays...
...Much of the art reproduced in The Illustrated Jesus was inspired by or produced for Christian worship...
...his weakness is a disdain for the bulk of the recalcitrant "issues" plaguing this society...
...There is a good balance of Western and Eastern art, high and low, classical and popular...
...Yes, Sister Wendy has convinced us that art is for everybody and you don't need to be a Cambridge art historian to appreciate it...
...Many of these are difficult questions for any thoughtful Catholic, and no less for a Buckley whose purpose in Nearer, My God, after all, is to say that orthodox Roman Catholicism is an appropriate and blessed life for a serious, intellectually rigorous modern...
...Of the worshiping congregation as a dynamic or mutually supportive body, nothing...
...her shrewd strategy is to attack the extreme rhetoric of her fellow prolifers...
...It is our Christian tradition...
...After World War II, C. S. Lewis had a similar influence among serious readers...
...Generally, one suspects him of happiness, and satisfaction...
...More gratifyingly, Tinder argues for "responsible hope," over against the callousness and greed of "capitalist and bureaucratic institutions...
...But he rightly notes that the most fractious disputes pitting "social unity" against "religious liberty and diversity" occur in public school debates, ranging from school prayer to "textbook tampering...
...Of course, Pelikan's book is not offered to the "scholarly" market...
...Editor Gregory Wolfe, sounding a sacred art that is less opaque, less like a theology written in a foreign language...
...Still, even he admits, there is simply no "prophetic" voice now" like Eliot (or Solzhenitsyn), and no "philosophical artist" comparable to Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy...
...KI Monsignor Joseph Fete is the rector of Sai~zt loseph Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio...
...Many of the Western paintings in this book existed previously as altar pieces, or continue to exist as wall or ceiling murals in churches and chapels, and help create the proper environment for worship...
...In the area of the country where I live large numbers of Catholics, not so much rejecting Catholic doctrine as seeking palpable, lively Christian communities for themselves and their children, have joined local Protestant churches--parishes, really...
...All four of these writers are cited in this collection, which is in effect a residual version of that much older 2roject, but now in far less propitious circumstances...
...Surely, he is the last person who would be content to see the church become just another fairly sizable Christian denomination...
...Her recommendation of "simple friendship and support" for women with unwanted pregnancies may seem feeble in this fiercest of debates, but it may refocus the discussion...
...And the penultimate chapter, the book's climax, is Buckley's account of his nephew Michael Bozell's recent ordination as a priest in a contemplative French Benedictine monastery where he will spend his life in prayer...
...In that sense, then, little need be said about the seventeen-yearold text...
...Why not pictures of the brilliantly restored frescoes...
...Os Guinness's principle of "covenantalism"--of citizens pursuing their interests but acting responsibly as members of a "commonwealth'--may seem abstract...
...and T. S. Eliot remained a powerfully "prophetic" presence...
...In an increasingly pictorial age, the science of theology may now be tuning in to this visual channel...
...He does not speak about his spiritual life in prayer, works, and the sacraments...
...Painting dominates the illustrations in this volume and they are beautifully reproduced...
...A heady theological draught...
...Western painting seems to predominate...
...Nearer, My God's last chapter is a lovely memoir of his mother...
...Buckley's Catholicism is liturgical, not evangelical...
...MosaiCs and sculpture are underrepresented, perhaps because of the difficulty in reproducing them in a flat, printed medium...
...It is clear in Nearer, My God that Buckley himself is at least liturgically active in his parish...
...It is about whether individual souls will persist to salvation...
...Buckley's heart is completely at ease here...
...A demand created by television and computer screens for what can be taken in at a glance and does not demand to be read or wrestled with...
...Unfortunately, the lack of proper identification for some of the pictures creates occasional confusion...
...There is little in Nearer, My God about a redemption of the people of God...
...Are we drawn to the icon or to the fleeting image...
...But who's who...
...Or is it an obsession with the visual and tactile...
...Looking at Warner Sallman's familiar "Head of Christ" alongside Matthias Grffnewald's "Resurrection" from the Isenheim Altarpiece, or Rublev's "Old Testament Trinity," reveals that some religious art is inspired more by American advertising than by mystical experience...
...The attention that Pelikan gives Christian art in this book also reminds us of the importance of giving equal weight to both the literary and the monumental or graphic sources of our tradition...
...This is Buckley's Catholicism...
...Its devotional energy is private, not communal...
...Somewhat unsettlingly, the reader has to dig into the footnotes to see that the work of key contributors is most likely to appear in or cite "right" journals like CommeJ~tary, Crisis, First Things, and The National Review...
...Of the nineteen essays, two pieces, finally, capture particularly well where "we" are, at the millennium...
...Vigen Guroian outlines "a contemporary ethic of death and dying" tor the "postbiblical" near-future...
...The Illustrated ]esus sets before us a theological feast for the eyes and whets our appetite for more about LIMITED VISION David J. DeLaura ~ arly in this century, in an already post-Christian culture, the case for the reasonableness of Christianity was effectively made by G. K. Chesterton...
...But the "little" that does need to be said also applies to Pelikan's magisterial multivolume work, The Christian Tradition...
...I think it has more to do with his diffidence...
...Devotional prayer and meditation as well as the sacred liturgy have relied on the efficacy of "visual theology" since the time of the catacombs...
...In that regard, one is compelled to ask why pictures of the smoky and cracked frescoes of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel are used...
...History that analyzes a culture's architecture and art is essential...
...Tocqueville told us that individualism is what we have in America, and that it is communities and mutual support that we look for...
...Charles Morris, in American Catholic (1997), has found that, for all the turmoil, the heterodoxy, the decline in numbers of clergy, Catholicism in America is flourishing in the parishes...
...In his autobiographical Hunger qf Memorz...
...Guinness pleads for a "commitment to universal rights...
...A hankering for the real behind the illusion...
...It is hard to say exactly why religious art in all media and genres is so popular...
...This collection is, in effect, a serious statement from the still informal coalition of conservative Catholics and moderate Evangelicals and some other Protestants...
...and redistributionalist (oh...
...Casting Jaroslav Pelikan in the role of curator for The Illustrated Jesus through the Centuries is a shrewd idea and for the most part the enterprise succeeds...
...Walk into any Orthodox or Eastern Rite church and the iconostasis transports you to heaven in time for the eternal liturgy...
...A restlessness that is quelled only when our "hearts rest in Thee...
...Not Buckley...
...If one had access to a dictionary of iconographic symbolism one could figure such things out for oneself...
...Two thoughtful essays deserve close attention...
...Possessed of this tool one could also determine Commonweal | _9 March 13, 1998 that, contrary to the caption, the Lindau Gospels do not portray the four symbols of the Gospels...
...This volume returns us to the knowledge that art is more than pretty pictures--it is a way of doing theology...
...hopeful note, seeks a middle ground between current extremes: on the one hand, the anti-intellectual Evangelicals, as well as the juggernaut of late twentieth-century "industrial capitalism...
...Many of the World War II-era converts to Catholicism, or to reaction, had despaired of man and politics...
...Yet frequently these sources continue to be overlooked in theological investigation...
...Tinder voices a deep suspicion of "Enlightenment rationa l i s m ' - - b u t he ignores that even thoughtful Christians will, inevitably, live in problematic interaction with modernity and all its p o s t / p o s t / p o s t phases...
...Except for a claim that Return novarum (1891) inveighed not against capitalism but against materialism, there is not a word about the social and economic statements of the popes and the bishops, strong on human rights (Bill...
...In neither Tile Christian TradiCommonweal | 6 March 13, 1998 tion nor The Illustrated Jesus does Pelikan show much appreciation for the texts of Christian liturgies...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 5
