Beauty

Winchester Cathedral – not my dad’s old parish!

Recently, we have been worshipping at the parish where my dad was priest in my teenage years. Various thoughts have assaulted me, and I thought I’d share two of them. First, the experience of worshipping surrounded by beauty, second, getting plugged back into the liturgical tradition of Anglicanism after years of exile …

In the January 31 episode of the Ad Fontes podcast, Onsi, Colin, and Rhys discussed beauty. You can listen to it here. Beauty is not, ultimately, necessary. Beauty is not a transcendental. And most churches today avoid spending extra money to be beautiful, echoing Judas Iscariot — could this money not be spent on the poor? Nonetheless, most Christians admit that beauty in worship and worship spaces is desirable, if oftentimes financially unattainable.

One point that was made was that no one has been wholesale converted through beauty. Sure, Malcolm Guite’s atheism was cracked by John Keats while visiting Keats House in Rome — but Guite was raised by Christian parents and no doubt had so much Gospel hidden in his heart that it was this that brought him to the living Word behind the words of Keats. Rod Dreher was converted from atheism to Rome by Chartres Cathedral. Yet, once again — he will have needed the ecclesial community of the Roman Catholic Church and the teaching of the church to make a full conversion, I imagine.

Those are the two counterexamples I know, but they nonetheless highlight to us the importance beauty of our experience of God. God has created a beautiful cosmos and is Himself simultaneously everywhere within this cosmos, ordering it aright and thus accessible through its beauty, and beyond it by far. And he, the creator God, has created us in his image. In Tolkien’s vocabulary, we are subcreators.

Making beautiful things is what we do. It’s part of living for God’s glory, showing Him His glory, and living out our existence as beings shot through with His glory.

Now, back to church the Sunday before that podcast episode dropped.

My three-year-old son is irrepressible. He cannot be stopped. Throughout the entire church service, he sat on my knee, rarely taking a break from talking, with a pause to have a snack and many attempts from me to keep the volume down.

At one point, this unstoppable force looked across the aisle from us to the many stained-glass windows flanking the nave and said, “Is that Jesus?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“To remind us that Jesus came to rescue us.”

“Why can’t we see through the window?” (This query was repeated later.)

“By making a window out of stained glass, we can see the picture of Jesus but still have the daylight filling the room. The light shining through the window reminds us that Jesus is the light of world, sort of like what Abbot Suger of St-Denis says.”

I don’t expect my sons to get the references to people like Abbot Suger. But I think it’s worth sprinkling conversation with these references to point them to big world of knowledge that awaits.

A while later, he looked to the front.

“Is that Jesus, too?” he queried.

“Yes, that’s Jesus, too,” I answered.

One of the windows on the walls of the apse portrays Jesus and the little children.

I think it’s great that my wee men go to church and hear hymns, hear sermons, hear prayers, hear the Scriptures read. I have no doubt it is good for their spirits to have these come to them. And I know that they don’t just wash over them. The four-and-a-half-year-old is particularly good at remembering tiny references we thought he wasn’t listening to. He is our listener, our watcher, our observer, taking it all in and synthesising the world into knowledge.

Nonetheless, I also love that we can go to this place of beauty where the light shines through, where Jesus shines down on us (most of the windows are of the Lord, in fact), and we ourselves are drawn by the beauty into His true, eternal Beauty, whether we are three or thirty-eight.

I just finished teaching my students about iconoclasm, and there’s something of St John of Damascus in all of this, about participating in Christ through encountering His image, not to mention my reference to Pseudo-Dionysius via Suger of St-Denis (Denis = French for Dionysius). We can meet with Jesus with the help of these images, seeing His beauty made manifest for us in the stained glass.

Maybe the expense is worth it?

God the Word, hidden in beauty

Chartres Cathedral

Over at Read the Fathers — where I’m now the lead admin — we recently finished reading Justin Martyr’s Apologies. My week-in-review of this/these texts was concerned with Justin’s Logos theology, principally the idea that God the Word, the Logos of John 1 (‘In the beginning was the Word…’) exists as the Logos spermatikos in the minds and hearts of humans, even of pagans.

The presence of the Logos spermatikos is the reason why Greek philosophy is capable of getting things so very right. God the Word exists in all correct reasoning, in all truth, whether a disciple of Jesus is the one who expresses it or not.

This has come into contact with something else that has been rattling about in my brain lately, namely that beauty is a vehicle for God as well.

First, two fragmentary stories. Rod Dreher, in his book The Benedict Option, tells how the beauty of Chartres cathedral was foundational for cutting through his atheism and converting him to Roman Catholicism. Only a religion that would produce architecture so beautiful was worth believing.

Malcolm Guite, who blogs here, during the Laing Lectures at Regent College 2019, talked about his conversion to theism when visiting Rome. He was not converted by the splendour of St Peter’s or my dearly beloved late antique mosaics, but by a visit to Keats House, where he read some Keats, and found there a beauty that his own reductionistic unbelief could not accommodate. I do not know what Keats’ own faith was, but his poetry is not explicitly Christian — mind you, this was Guite’s stepping forth into theism, not yet into the embrace of Christianity.

Beauty stalks the earth abroad, despite the darkness of so much pain. It is in cathedrals and poems and music and freshly fallen snow.

Beauty points people towards God.

A third, even more fragmentary story. My cousin’s husband Georg once started telling me a story about one of his seminary professors. This professor discovered the Rolling Stones. And he loved them. He thought this music was great. It was beautiful. But it jarred against the sort of Christian sensibilities he had at the time. How could people who so clearly do not know Christ produce such good music? This is honestly as far as the story got, before we were interrupted. I think (but am not sure) that Abraham Kuyper came up.

How I think the story would have ended was that the beauty of God does not restrict itself to those who know Him. We are all made in the image of God, after all. And He is everywhere. And so pagans like the Rolling Stones can make amazing music.

Let us come back to Justin, then. Beauty is a sign that there is a God. It is evidence, like logic and truth and good philosophy, that Christ is at work in His world, in the lives of people. Therefore, not only can it help save a soul, as with Dreher and Guite, it also produces results in human hearts, hearts restless since they do not rest in the embrace of the Most Holy Trinity.

The upshot of this, then, is fairly simple and perhaps less complicated than what I have written. Just as the Church Fathers were glad to ‘spoil the Egyptians’ by taking the truths of pagan philosophy and putting them into the service of Christ, so should we recognise beauty when we see it, regardless of its maker — whether it is the beauty of the Rolling Stones or of Buddhist art from Gandhara or of Virgilian verse. Praise God for it.

And then, let us seek beauty where we can, and pray for it to draw our loved ones into the rich warmth of God’s love.

Spiritualising the human form in the Middle Ages

 

Yesterday I took advantage of free museum day in Paris to make my third trip to the Musée nationale du Moyen-Age (aka Musée de Cluny). Some items not previously viewed were on display, sometimes because they’ve redone some displays, sometimes because I may not have paid enough attention in previous visits. Anyway, besides some really amazing ivory carvings that really deserve their own posts, I spent a little time with some fragmentary Gothic sculpture.

But I took no photos of that sculpture. Nonetheless, here’s something like what I saw, only more complete, from the central portal of Chartres Cathedral:

These three figures, you will note, are extraordinarily tall and slender. Kind of cubey around the edges, too. This is in part because they are, in fact, pillars. Since they serve an architectural function and are not stand-alone statues, they have been adapted to the space.

Nonetheless, I have seen other mediaeval figures like this; this slender, elongated form is not reserved for Gothic column-statues. Byzantine icons also tend to be sort of … low on flesh, if you will.

This lack of fleshiness was first pointed out to me on a trip to the Troodos Mountains in Cyprus, where our guide, Fr Ioannis, a painter and iconographer, asked some of the better-informed what struck them about some of the frescoes at Panayia Podithou. The answer: They look fleshier than a lot of classic Byzantine icons.

Fr Ioannis explained that this was due to ‘Western’ (add, ‘Renaissance and later’) influences upon Cypriot iconography. A classic Byzantine icon will be long and slender with nary a muscle and certainly no bulk to the figures. I present to you, as an example, the fresco of the Transfiguration on the exterior of St Sozomen’s Church, Galata, Cyprus (15th-c, my photo):

You can see here that the figure of Christ in particular is a fairly unfleshy sort. This Byzantine style is also visible in an ivory plaque in the Musée de Cluny depicting the coronation of Holy Roman Emperor Otto II* and his wife, the Byzantine princess  Theophano in 982/3:

The above is not my photo; mine was taken on my phone and is blurry. Nonetheless, this Byzantinising image is also very religious. In the centre is Christ who legitimates Otto II’s rule as Holy Roman Emperor; He is the largest, central figure, crowning the two monarchs who are dressed in Byzantine style. Compare it to my photo of this ivory carving of Christ crowning Romanos and Eudoxia in Constantinople a few decades earlier.

What this waifiness signifies, I believe (and as the post title suggests), is the spiritualisation of the human form. It is not necessarily a retreat from the goodness of the human body; the East and West are both accused of this in the Middle Ages, but if you take this visual evidence with the written evidence of the best theologians, you will see that there was a very strong belief in the inherent goodness of the human body as part of God’s creation.

In the Renaissance, the spiritual aspect of God’s good act of creating was found in expressing naturalism, from Fra Angelico to Michelangelo. In the Middle Ages, it was found in expressing spiritual truth.

The human person is not only a pscychosomatic unity but also inspired, inspirited, spiritual. We are tripartite — spirit-soul/mind/nous-flesh. Naturalism grounds the image in the present reality too much for the mediaeval mind. The goal is to set the mind on things above (Col. 3:2). Therefore, not only in subject matter (Christ, his Mother, the saints, Bible stories) but in style, that which is above is transmitted to our minds through the art.

The human form is elongated. Its muscle is toned down. It is still explicitly and specifically human in these mediaeval images. But now it is also otherworldly. It is spirit-and-body all at once. In a human face visible to you on the street today, you cannot see the soul. In contrast, in a mediaeval statue, ivory, or painting, you see the inner as well as the outer.

This spiritualising impacts the art in more ways than this, but I’ll leave it there for now. The next time you see such a form, I hope its intrinsic beauty will strike you to spend some time in your own nous looking for the spiritual and then moving upward to the God of the uncreated light.

*Here’s a happy-looking Romanesque Otto from a manuscript illumination.