Sacred art

“ Christian art comprises the earth and its humanities, and, by implication, God and Christ also; and sacred art is the emanating idea—the central causating power—the jasper throne, whereon sits Christ, surrounded by the prophets, apostles, and saints, administering judgement, wisdom, and holiness. In this sense, then, the art you would call sacred is not sacred, but Christian: and, as all perfect art158 is Christian, regeneration necessarily can only flow thence ”

“ These various stages in the evolution of scholastic theology were also embodied in sacred art, and especially in cathedral sculpture, in glass-staining, in mosaic working, and in missal painting.
The creative Being is thus represented sometimes as the third person of the Trinity, in the form of a dove brooding over chaos; sometimes as the second person, and therefore a youth; sometimes as the first person, and therefore fatherly and venerable; sometimes as the first and second persons, one being venerable and the other youthful ”

“ I hope it will be clearly understood that I have taken throughout the æsthetic and not the religious view of those productions of Art which, in as far as they are informed with a true and earnest feeling, and steeped in that beauty which emanates from genius inspired by faith, may cease to be Religion, but cannot cease to be Poetry ”

“ They have become, in consequence, frequent and important subjects of Art, particularly from the tenth century—the period when, in their personal character, they began to be regarded not merely as gifted and venerable, but as divinely inspired ”

“ Whatever there is of literary merit, of philosophic thought, or of poetic depth in the Bible is incidental.
There is the conserved spiritual force of Christian art. The masterpieces in painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and architecture are Christian. ”

“ All undefined and indefinable the spiritual glow and beauty that lie upon the soul, like the [Pg 48] soft bloom upon a ripe peach. What song is to the birds, what culture is to the intellect, and eloquence is to the orator, that the spiritual is to character. It is the soul made ample in faculty, fertile in resource, struck through and through with ripeness, and inflected toward Christ's own sympathy, self-sacrifice and love.
The spiritual element also explains the note of distinction in the highest life and art. Many of our modern painters have failed, because they have been fleshly. ”

“ The plein air painters are painting the light, and the sculptors are carving shadows and haloes, and we have not an art left which does not lean out into the Invisible. And religion is full of this spirit and theosophy and Christian Science. ”

“ Have painting and sculpture sought to represent objects of refining grace and sublimity? the church of Christ persuaded them to look into the records of the Christian past, and there they found treasures of beauty and splendor, devotion and martyrdom, whose wealth of illustration as examples; incentives, and memorials, art has not exhausted for centuries, and will never exhaust. Christian history is the inexhaustible quarry of whatever is most noble and heroic in man, purified by the grace of God. Has architecture sought to invest stone with the attributes of spiritual and intellectual grace? ”

“ So saint and poet and artist-craftsman join in that appropriation of Christianity which was putting life into whatever had come from the Latin Fathers, by pondering upon it, loving it, living it, imagining it, and making it into poetry and art. ”

“ When from darkness it was able to step forth into the light of day, art, restored to the temple of its birth, set the feeling which produced above the mere beauty of the production. It lost in harmony, but gained in expression, in lifting up human nature even to the type of moral perfection, to the supreme ideal—God made man. ”

“ And in thus putting the arts to universal use, you will find also their universal inspiration, their universal benediction. I told you there was no evidence of a special Divineness in any application of them; that they were always equally human and equally Divine; and in closing this inaugural series of lectures, into which I have endeavoured to compress the principles that are to be the foundations of your future work, it is my last duty to say some positive words as to the Divinity of all art, when it is truly fair, or truly serviceable. ”

“ It is to bow to their immutable terms, to lay all passion and vexation of spirit prostrate at [81] their feet, and to approach their divine presence with a mind so calm and so void of littleness as to be ready to receive the dictates of fantasy and the revelations of truth. Thus the art becomes a divinity, man approaches her with religious feelings, his inspirations are God's divine gifts, and his aim fixed by the same hand from above which helps him to attain it. ”

“ Christian Art, like the Religious Art of the world in general,—from the thou and thee of simplest Quakerism, outward and audible sounds of an inward and silent spirit, up to the profoundest mystic ritualism of the Buddhist,—Christian Art abounds in Emblems ”

“ The work is one vast, comprehensive, and sacramental manifestation of the central Catholic sacrament of the mass, searching and final in its symbolism, consummate in its mastery of all the elements that enter into the make-up of a great work of pictorial and decorative art, unapproached and unapproachable in its splendour of living and radiant colour. ”

“ I discern in it the end of that Christian art which paints the soul and inspires the beholder with an ardent desire for heaven. Future painters will not restrain themselves as does this one to portraying on the side of a wall or on a wooden panel the cursed matter of which our bodies are formed; they will celebrate and glorify it. They will clothe their figures with dangerous appearances of flesh, and these figures will seem like real persons. ”

“ The argument for this insidious and perilous exchange is sometimes put in a kind of religious phraseology, as if these visits to beautiful scenes in nature were only the introduction to another kind of worship, and as if gazing upon the master-pieces of human art in painting, or sculpture, or architecture, exercised a purifying and elevating influence on the mind ”

“ How joyous, sweet, yea intoxicating and full of merriment, cheerful, and smiling does Christianity appear through all the genuine works of modern art, how blessed and pleasing are they, when in the greatness and fulness of the old world, yet like a spirit of gentle melancholy that passes away as the cloud, momentarily over the beautiful landscape in the brilliancy of spring. ”

“ Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.” ”

“ Thus from remembrance and the feeling of a hereafter is born poetry; is born art: the realization of the ideal under sensible forms, wherein intellectual beauty takes precedence over the physical beauty of nature. Both speak a language which lifts us up to the absolute beauty—God; of whom creation is an image and symbol. And, moreover, religion discloses an ideal world which is not contained under external phenomena. ”

“ It is only when the artist seeks to bring out the purest and loftiest sentiments of the soul, such as only Christianity can inspire, that he may hope to surpass the sculpture of antiquity in one department of that art alone,--in expression, rather than in beauty of form, on which no improvement can be made. ”

“ And surely the art of the painter and every other creative and constructive art are full of them—weaving, embroidery, architecture, and every kind of manufacture; also nature, animal and vegetable—in all of them there is grace or the absence of grace. And ugliness and discord and inharmonious motion are nearly allied to ill-words and ill-nature, as grace and harmony are the twin sisters of goodness and virtue and bear their likeness. ”

“ No wonder, then, if, in modern Christendom, music and painting, the art or symbolism of soul and spirit, have been chiefly cultivated, and attained their highest development and perfection, whereas the art of the perfect development of organic form and corporeal and sensual beauty, reached its height of excellence in the sculpture of classical antiquity, which in the same way and degree will never again be paralleled, or at least will never be surpassed. ”

“ I went so far in my exaltation as to write an inspired—or so it seemed to me—article on Art as the New Religion, proving that the old religions having perished and the old gods fallen, art had re-arisen in its splendour and glory to provide a new gospel, a new god, to take their place, and I filled my essay with ingenious arguments, and liberal quotations from William Morris and Ruskin, and rhetorical flights of prophecy. ”

“ Eternal ideas which the mind conceives are the foundation of Art, as they are of Philosophy. Art claims to be creative, and is in a certain sense inspired, like the genius of a poet. However material the creation, the spirit which gives beauty to it is of the mind and soul. Imagination is tasked to its utmost stretch to portray sentiments and passions in the way that makes the deepest impression. The marble bust becomes animated, and even the temple consecrated to the deity becomes religious, in proportion as these suggest the ideas and sentiments which kindle the soul to admiration and awe. ”

“ Thank thou God that thou art assisted in the thralldom of His Threshold, art favored in the Kingdom, art heralding the Name of the True One, art speaking of divine praises, art guiding the souls to the Sun of Truth, art quickening the dead with the breaths of the Holy Spirit and art endeavoring with heart and soul to spread the Cause. ”

“ Make Art a fashion, honor and reward it, crown its great masters with Olympic leaves, direct the energies of an age or race upon it, and we probably shall have great creations, whether the people are Christian or Pagan. So that Art seems to be a human creation, rather than a divine inspiration. It is the result of genius, stimulated by circumstances and directed to the contemplation of ideal excellence. ”

“ But in our admiration of the genius and piety of these monastic artists we must not overlook one great fact, that this art is not only a representation of the interior life of the nation, a representation of its manners, customs, and modes of existence, but it is also a reflection of the state of the church at each successive period. ”

“ We are therefore not surprised to find that both the arts of sculpture and painting have been peculiarly fitted to incorporate under ideal form not merely the ancient gods, but Christ as saviour of the world, and individual apostles and saints. That which is the most essential truth in actual life is concentrated to a focus on itself in the determinate embodiment of art, rather than continually forced from its serenity through dependence upon finite conditions. ”

“ The return to classical ideals caused a revival of paganism, while the concentration of man’s mind on the pleasures of art, on the sensuous delight in beauty of form and colour, led many on to sensuality. ”

“ We may affirm, then, that as human nature has been so greatly purified and elevated by the Christian Religion, Poetry, which deals with human nature in all its dearest and most intimate concerns, must have partaken of that purity and that elevation—and that it may now be a far holier and more sacred inspiration, than when it was fabled to be the gift of Apollo and the Muses. ”

“ Moreover, and this is very important, we all feel about art a certain obligation, such as some of us feel about religion. There is an “ought” about it. Perhaps we do not really care much about pictures and poetry and music, but we feel we “ought to.” ”

“ Good reasons exist for changes, doubtless; but I feel that we have here a work of art, of divine art; and art is one of God’s ways of reaching the human heart. We are proud that we have not discarded it from our church buildings, from our altars, from the music of our choirs. ”

“ But no picture ever painted, no poem ever perfected, no temple ever builded is comparable for strength and beauty to a full-orbed soul, matured through a widely trained reason and a sober judgment—mellow in heart and conscience, pervaded throughout with the spirit of Jesus Christ, the soul's master and model. ”

“ The god arises from the rite, he is gradually detached from the rite, and as soon as he gets a life and being of his own, apart from the rite, he is a first stage in art, a work of art existing in the mind, gradually detached from even the faded action of ritual, and later to be the model of the actual work of art, the copy in stone. ”

“ If it be an expression of emotion—as I am persuaded that it is—it is an expression of that emotion which is the vital force in every religion, or, at any rate, it expresses an emotion felt for that which is the essence of all. We may say that both art and religion are manifestations of man's religious sense, if by "man's religious sense" we mean his sense of ultimate reality. What we may not say is, that art is the expression of any particular religion ”

“ Starting from that earliest phase of pure spirituality and piety, an art whose aim was wholly absorbed in the expression of such religious emotions, painting proceeded more and more to associate the external life of the world with its religious subject-matter. ”

“ But not so can we turn from the intense life, that seems almost to breathe upon us from the celestial group of the Virgin and her Child, and from the Angels below: in these we have the evidence of the divine afflatus,--of inspired Art. ”

“ In its later developments it was the religion of beauty and art—an adoration of the ideal in form and feature—and its gods and goddesses became the gods and goddesses of beauty; hence the production of those masterpieces in architecture and art which are still so despairingly inimitable. ”

“ In reality all such objects, if only they transmit a true feeling experienced by the artist and comprehensible to every one (however insignificant it may seem to us to be) are works of real good Christian art. ”