“No sacred art can come from an isolated subjectivity,” Benedict states. Ultimately the beautiful is inseparable from the good and the true. If we will not have virtue and verity, caritas and claritas, we will not have beauty either.

In his masterful book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI defended the beauty and magnificence of liturgical tradition from the legion of fashion-oriented liturgists who had sought to disorient the sacrifice of the Mass from its true orientation towards God into an anthropocentric turning towards the “people of God”. In the midst of his brilliant exposition and explication of the true, traditional and timeless “spirit of the liturgy”, which was published a few years before he became pope, Benedict includes a section on “art and liturgy” in which he offers a succinctly penetrating history of art.

Defending the use of images in religious worship, in contradistinction to iconoclasm, Benedict explains that the use of such images had been sanctioned by Judaism until around the third or fourth century A.D., reminding the modern reader that “ancient synagogues were richly decorated with representations of scenes from the Bible”. As such, the earliest Christian images found in the catacombs were a development of “the canon of images already established by the synagogue”. All Christian images are, “without exception, in a certain sense images of the Resurrection”. They are the showing of history “in the light of the Resurrection”.

Iconography “gets beyond the surface of the empirical and perceives Christ, as the later theology of icons puts it, in the light of Tabor”. The icon “comes from prayer and leads to prayer”, transfiguring creation and creativity in the light of Christ: “If an interior opening-up does not occur in man that enables him to see more than what can be measured and weighed, to perceive the reflection of divine glory in creation, then God remains excluded from our field of vision.” This was understood by the early Church which is why the Second Council of Nicaea and all the following councils in their teaching on icons and sacred images regard iconography as “a confession of faith in the Incarnation and iconoclasm as a denial of the Incarnation, as the summation of all heresies”.

In a mystical sense the light of the first day of creation and the eternal light of the “eighth day” of the Lord’s Resurrection meet in the icon. Such art is “always characterized by the unity of creation, Christology, and eschatology: the first day is on its way toward the eighth, which in turn takes up the first”. It is, therefore, “ordered to the mystery that becomes present in the liturgy”.

A subtle change in the mystical orientation of art begins with the emergence of the Gothic, in which the central image of sacred art evolves from that surrounding the Resurrection and Ascension of the Lord towards a concentration on His Passion: “The depiction is no longer of the Pantocrator, the Lord of all, leading us into the eighth day. It has been superseded by the image of the crucified Lord in the agony of his Passion and death.” In this way, “the mysterial image has been replaced by the devotional image”.

Pope Benedict conjectures that scholasticism’s turn from Platonism to Aristotelianism might have contributed to this reorientation of art, though it is equally likely that the prevalence of the plague in the middle ages might also have led people to a deeper contemplation of the mystery of suffering in images of the Passion of Christ. “A devotion to the Cross of a more historicizing kind replaces orientation to the Oriens, to the risen Lord who has gone ahead of us.” Benedict is at pains to insist, however, that this difference of orientation should not be exaggerated. “True, the depiction of Christ dying in pain on the Cross is something new, but it still depicts him who bore our pains, by whose stripes we are healed. In the extremes of pain, it represents the redemptive love of God. Though Grünewald’s altarpiece takes the realism of the Passion to a radical extreme, the fact remains that it was an image of consolation. It enabled the plague victims cared for by the Antonians to recognize that God identified with them in their fate, to see that he had descended into their suffering and that their suffering lay hidden in his.”

The next major development in art comes with the humanism of the Renaissance in which man “experiences himself in his autonomy, in all his grandeur”, a perspective which was “something quite new”. In this so-called “emancipation” of man comes the development of the modern aesthetic, “the vision of a beauty that no longer points beyond itself but is content in the end with itself, the beauty of the appearing thing”. Such humanism sucks the spirit from art, divorcing art from the divine. Although Christian subjects are still being depicted, “such ‘religious art’ is no longer sacred art in the proper sense”: “There is often scarcely a difference between the depictions of pagan myths and those of Christian history.” This late Renaissance art “does not enter into the humility of the sacraments and their time-transcending dynamism”.

True transcendence returns with the age of the Baroque, which at its best is the fruit of the reform of the Church set in motion by the Council of Trent. The Baroque altarpiece was “like a window through which the world of God comes out to us”: “The curtain of temporality is raised, and we are allowed a glimpse into the inner life of the world of God [which] is intended to insert us into the liturgy of heaven. Again and again, we experience a Baroque church as a unique kind of fortissimo of joy, an Alleluia in visual form.”

Then came the so-called Enlightenment which “pushed faith into a kind of intellectual and even social ghetto”. Ironically, the rationalism of the self-styled “Age of Reason” did not merely lead to “a blindness of the spirit” but to an abandonment of reason itself: “[A]rt itself, which in impressionism and expressionism explored the extreme possibilities of the sense of sight, becomes literally object-less. Art turns into experimenting with self-created worlds, empty ‘creativity’, which no longer perceives the Creator Spiritus, the Creator Spirit. It attempts to take his place, and yet, in so doing, it manages to produce only what is arbitrary and vacuous, bringing home to man the absurdity of his role as creator.” Thus does the reduction of reason into mere rationalism result in a reductio ad absurdum in which reason itself dissolves into meaningless subjectivity.

“No sacred art can come from an isolated subjectivity,” Benedict states. He might also have added that no art of any real value, either sacred or profane, can come from such isolated and alienated subjectivity. Ultimately the beautiful is inseparable from the good and the true. If we will not have virtue and verity, caritas and claritas, we will not have beauty either. The truth does not only set us free, it also enables us to see; without it, we will not behold the beauty of the cosmos as made manifest in the music of the spheres; we will see nothing but mere matter. And if there’s nothing but mere matter, nothing really matters, including beauty. “Before all things,” Benedict writes, a renewal of art ”requires the gift of a new kind of seeing. And so it would be worth our while to regain a faith that sees. Wherever that exists, art finds its proper expression.”

Joseph Pearce’s book, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith is published by TAN Books.

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The featured image is “Entry into Jerusalem” (1640) by Alessandro Turchi, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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