Making the Invisible Visible (Update)
Tomorrow Pope Benedict meets with artists in the Sistine Chapel and will address them. In last Wednesday’s Audience the Pope spoke about the beauty and spiritual inspiration of Europe’s cathedrals. He said:
the power of the Romanesque style and the splendor of the Gothic cathedrals remind us that the “via pulchritudinis,” the way of beauty, is a privileged and fascinating route for approaching the Mystery of God. What is the beauty that writers, poets, musicians, artists contemplate and translate in their language, if not the reflection of the splendor of the eternal Word made flesh? St. Augustine affirms: “Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air, amply spread around everywhere, question the beauty of the sky, question the serried ranks of the stars, question the sun making the day glorious with its bright beams, question the moon tempering the darkness of the following night with its shining rays, question the animals that move in the waters, that amble about on dry land, that fly in the air; their souls hidden, their bodies evident; the visible bodies needing to be controlled, the invisible souls controlling them; question all these things. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look ; we’re beautiful.’ Their beauty is their confession. Who made these beautiful changeable things, if not one who is beautiful and unchangeable?” (Sermo CCXLI, 2: PL 38, 1134).
Dear brothers and sisters, may the Lord help us to rediscover the way of beauty as one of the ways, perhaps the most attractive and fascinating, to come to encounter and love God.
Sandro Magister provides further background and the full text of the Pope’s Audience Address here.
Update:
The Pope met with some two hundred fifty artists in the Sistine Chapel this morning. With the great frescoes of Michelangelo as incomparable setting, Pope Benedict said:
Dear friends, let us allow these frescoes to speak to us today, drawing us towards the ultimate goal of human history. The Last Judgement, which you see behind me, reminds us that human history is movement and ascent, a continuing tension towards fullness, towards human happiness, towards a horizon that always transcends the present moment even as the two coincide. Yet the dramatic scene portrayed in this fresco also places before our eyes the risk of man’s definitive fall, a risk that threatens to engulf him whenever he allows himself to be led astray by the forces of evil. So the fresco issues a strong prophetic cry against evil, against every form of injustice. For believers, though, the Risen Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life. For his faithful followers, he is the Door through which we are brought to that “face-to-face” vision of God from which limitless, full and definitive happiness flows. Thus Michelangelo presents to our gaze the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End of history, and he invites us to walk the path of life with joy, courage and hope. The dramatic beauty of Michelangelo’s painting, its colours and forms, becomes a proclamation of hope, an invitation to raise our gaze to the ultimate horizon.
And the Pope concludes:
Dear artists, as I draw to a conclusion, I too would like to make a cordial, friendly and impassioned appeal to you, as did my Predecessor. You are the custodians of beauty: thanks to your talent, you have the opportunity to speak to the heart of humanity, to touch individual and collective sensibilities, to call forth dreams and hopes, to broaden the horizons of knowledge and of human engagement. Be grateful, then, for the gifts you have received and be fully conscious of your great responsibility to communicate beauty, to communicate in and through beauty! Through your art, you yourselves are to be heralds and witnesses of hope for humanity! And do not be afraid to approach the first and last source of beauty, to enter into dialogue with believers, with those who, like yourselves, consider that they are pilgrims in this world and in history towards infinite Beauty! Faith takes nothing away from your genius or your art: on the contrary, it exalts them and nourishes them, it encourages them to cross the threshold and to contemplate with fascination and emotion the ultimate and definitive goal, the sun that does not set, the sun that illumines this present moment and makes it beautiful.
Sandro Magister has already posted the full text here.
What a marvelous quote from St. Augustine.
I’m not sure to what extent artists in the church’s orbit pursue beauty for beauty’s sake. I’d think that anyone contemplating the human condition, and contrasting it with the Kingdom of Heaven for which we strive, might create works that reflect our imperfections, and call for us to change or improve. Thus a political element seems to inject itself from time to time. (See this in some of the lyrics from contemporary liturgical music).
I’d think that anyone contemplating the human condition, and contrasting it with the Kingdom of Heaven for which we strive, might create works that reflect our imperfections, and call for us to change or improve.
Yes, there is nothing more beautiful than a self-righteous full-of-himself artist berating us about our imperfections. Forgive my sarcasm (or not), but this reminds me of that old saw about Art’s purpose being to offend the stupid bourgeois. Then I thought about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and almost laughed out loud.
I don’t pretend to know the purpose of Art, but good Lord, to reflect our imperfections and call for us to change or improve ourselves? How utterly dreary!
Bob, it is perhaps true that Western Art has staggered under the weight of the prima donna artiste ever since, well, at least Beethoven. And part of the myth of the artiste is not just that art can instruct us but that the artiste is just the one to show us the way. A large amount of crap has been shoveled our way as a result.
However, you seem to admit that art exists as such. If you do in fact believe this, then if you extract the artiste from the picture and posit that the (or a) “real presence” of something exists in the work itself. So what is it? Where does this beauty come from? I am not suggesting that it is there as a teaching aid from God. But it does seem to me to be showing us something that is different from the mundane. In that case, could we not say that it might be inspirational?
Mr. Schwartz –
What about Isaiah and Jeremiah? Great poets if ever there were any. And, closer in time to us, Honore Daumier? Or even closer, Dickens? Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, and George Bernanos? Heinrich Boll? William Faulkner? Not to mention “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, not a very good book but an extremely important criticism of the American institution of slavery.
Unagidon:
Your question is way beyond my ability to answer. All I can say is that it seems to me that, subject to the cultural and historical structural edifices existing in the artist’s and viewer’s minds, what is present in the work of art resonates with something inherent in the being of the one contemplating that work. Or something like that…
Ann:
my broad-brush tirade was, perhaps, unfair to Jim, and beyond that, perhaps unfair to artists in general. But when I contemplate some of the “viscera artists” mainly in Germany, I have to say enough already; yes, it is ugly, but is it art? And I don’t think Isaiah and Jeremiah considered themselves poets, however much we may see the poetry of their admonishments and pleas to God.
As for Waugh, I have stated before that I think Scoop and Decline and Fall are among the most excruciatingly funny books ever produced by a British writer. Faulkner gives me a headache, but that’s my bad, not his. Ive never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin; I need no convincing that the slavery episode was hideous beyond words.
In the US we don’t have true Romanesque or Gothic cathedrals but we do have churches dating from the 19th century revival of those styles. It’s a minor coincidence that two Episcopal Churches with the same name have often been cited as stellar examples of church architecture: Trinity Church in Boston for Romanesque Revival and Trinity Church at Wall Street in New York for Gothic Revival.
When I’ve visited either church it’s clear that “advanced” social and cultural tendencies of the kind that wouldn’t appeal to Benedict are often in evidence along with the wonderfully preserved architecture.
I think it’s worth throwing into the mix of these interesting reflections the idea of iconography in the Eastern Tradition. Because the Incarnation revealed the invisible God, likenesses of God in human form are now not only acceptable but, as we in the West might say, “most fitting.”
This is one of the hymns (the Kontakion) from the Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which celebrates the restoration of iconography:
No one could describe the Word of the Father;
but when He took flesh from you, O Theotokos, He accepted to be described,
and restored the fallen image to its former beauty.
We confess and proclaim our salvation in word and images.