John Saward - The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty: Art, Sanctity, and the Truth of Catholicism

The Beauty of Holiness
and the Holiness of Beauty

Art, Sanctity, and the Truth of Catholicism

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

The Bernard Gilpin Lectures
in Pastoral Theology

The University of Durham
May 1996

Cover art: Fra Angelico, The San Marco Altarpiece:
Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints (detail)
Scala / Art Resource, N.Y.

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

1997 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-89870-632-7
Library of Congress catalogue number 97-70815
Printed in the United States of America

Ad honorem
Beatae Mariae Semper Virginis
Deiparae Totae Pulchrae

O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!

PSALM 96(95):9

In the realm of sensible images, the artist keeps his eyes fixed on the thing he is copying. He does not let himself be turned aside or torn away by anything else he can see.... So it is with the artists who love beauty in the soul. Their intense and unfailing contemplation of His fragrant and hidden beauty gives them an unerring likeness of God.... They do now gawp at the glory stupidly lauded by the mob, but by the imitation of God they distinguish between good and evil. They are divine images of the fragrant Godhead.

DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE

The Church, which was once the mother of poets no less than of saints, during the last two centuries has relinquished to aliens the chief glories of poetry, if the chief glories of holiness she has preserved for her own. The palm and the laurel, Dominic and Dante, sanctity and song, grew together in her soil: she has retained the palm, but forgone the laurel. Poetry in its widest sense, and when not professedly irreligious, has been too much and too long either misprised or distrusted; too much and too generally the feeling has been that it is at best superfluous, at worst pernicious, most often dangerous. Once poetry was, as she should be, the lesser sister and helpmate of the Church; the minister to the mind, as the Church to the soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and in place of lovingly reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to follow the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has not been well for religion.

FRANCIS THOMPSON

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendour of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Churchs human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make then Church into a place where beautyand hence truthis at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of Hell.

JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER

There are three great gateways to God, of goodness, truth, and beauty, yet in the Christian West, they have been sundered by the emergence of first a Protestant and then a secular culture. Neither truth nor goodness now need seem beautiful, and beauty in creation and creature has become, at best, a mere projection of subjective experience, at worst, a worldly temptation and a snare to turn the heart and mind from the eternal.

Yet Satan is no more the author of beauty than of goodness or of truth, for all three come from Godthe Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the Trinity in Unityand have then final harmony in Him. There is a heavenly beauty about the unity belonging to the Trinity in the Christian truths of creation, redemption, and deification, in which the Eternal God who made the world and man first made them good, and then redeemed man from sin and death through His Son, and in that redemption began the restoration of the whole creation to a greater glory. So the divine Son through whom the world was made became very flesh of man to save him, and to make him God, and both creation and man are good in their origin and in their end, and in their beauty reflect their divine original. But man himself, being made in the image of a maker, is himself a maker or re-maker of beauty, a beauty that flows from the Craftsman-Creator and like the divine light in Christ at His Transfiguration shines through the whole creation. Thus beauty is no mere subjective value in the eye of the beholder, nor the delight in the lust of the eye of flesh, but, quite as much as goodness and truth, belongs to an objective reality almost beyond our reason and experience, though we distantly behold its splendour. And so in lowlier measure, the universe in its beauty, as in its truth and goodness, worships and proclaims its celestial origin and end, its alpha and omega, and man is privileged to perceive, and then to re-create in the art through which he offers his author praise and thanksgiving, the reflected and transmuted glory of the God who made him to be His forever.

John Sawards book is a meditation on these themes, arising from a painting by Fra Angelico, who embodied in the spiritual beauty of his life as, well as in his work the teaching of the great medieval Dominican and Franciscan scholar-saints and translated that teaching into the lovely images of a Renaissance Catholic culture, Angelico proclaimed the truth and goodness of God anew through the beauty of the images employed in worship, which present Him for that worship in the beauty of holiness both in Himself and in His Incarnation and in the lives and deeds of His saints, above all, in the Virgin Mary, His Mother, the very pinnacle of His creation. No painter realised more completely than Angelico the beauty of the resurrection body before God in the divine liturgy in Paradise. No one else has more adequately portrayed the perfected radiance of the saints before the throne. No one else has made the altarpieces that preside above the Mass so suggestive of the courts of heaven. And in Angelicos pictures, the highest theology and ethics cleanse the senses and the imagination in the loveliness of paint, proclaiming the unity of truth, goodness, and beauty and their power to hallow the mind and heart and to raise them, through the worship of His Body and Blood in the Mass and in the veneration of the saints, to their final end, in the vision of God.

Professor Saward puts Angelico firmly in his setting in that springtime of the spirit, that Florentine Renaissance in which Christian art paid the homage of Christian worship to Christian truth and holiness. But Professor Saward ranges far beyond the artists time and place to illustrate Angelicos themes with an extraordinary erudition, from the Bible and the Fathers and the Schoolmen to modern poetry. He thereby shows the manner in which one part of the Christian Tradition can illuminate any other and how, in depicting the loveliness of Christ and his creatures, Angelico declares both the timeless truth of their teaching and their holiness of life, from the first Christian century to ours.

Sometimes a thing is more easily defined by its negation. Readers may be offended by Professor Sawards discussion of the Reformation. Its treatment of Durham Cathedral is their refutation, as is the subsequent history of Protestant art. Protestantism secularised the image by declaring it idolatrous. The vacuum created by the Enlightenments destruction of a Catholic culture has been filled by a secular culture whose images have become increasingly depraved and whose central icons, like the screaming popes of Francis Bacon and the pop singer Madonna, are parodies of the Catholicism they seek both to exploit and to destroy. The poverty of so much modern Catholic art, and its separation from theological study and holiness of life, together speak of a sickness at the heart of our Western culture. Only through the recovery of Angelicos holistic visionin which eye as well as ear finds delight in divine truth, which is known not in pride, but in humility, on our knees in worshipwill we recapture Angelicos realisation, in images filled, with light from heaven, of the radiance of Gods glory.