July 2023 Print

By William Gonch, Ph. D.

What makes art Catholic? It’s a question with many answers, and this issue’s contributors will explore it from numerous angles. But whenever Catholics make art, we can see certain questions arise about the relationship between the world and its meaning. The Faith enabled Christians to see the created world as an expression of God’s love. It showed us that each of us is infinitely important because Christ found each of us to be worth dying for. In this, the Gospel enabled artists to pay deeper attention to the particularity of the created world, and especially to human individuality. At the same time, it sees the world allegorically: God speaks His love to us through his creation, and we participate in that speech through acts of charity. As Catholic art develops, we see artists paying greater attention to created individuality and to allegorical meaning, eventually asking, “how can we represent both?”

When the Catholic Church entered the world, it addressed a Classical culture proud of its rich artistic heritage. The early Church—small, persecuted, and with a never-before-heard message—was mainly concerned with converting the world, not with practicing the arts. Nevertheless, a distinctively Catholic literature emerges even in the first Christian centuries, often in works that were not intended to be “art,” and its most distinctive feature was its new vision of human worth.

The earliest Christian writers paid attention to ordinary people in a way that pagan art had never done. The great Jewish literary historian Erich Auerbach traces this change to the Gospels themselves. When the Gospel writers depict Peter’s betrayal and his subsequent anguished regret, they treat the actions and experiences of an ordinary fisherman as though they matter. Pagan art usually treated lowly characters like Peter as comic figures; when they play a role in a serious story, their cowardice is treated with contempt (compare Peter with Homer’s depiction of Eurylochus, Odysseus’s untrustworthy companion in the Odyssey). But the Gospel treats Peter’s betrayal with tragic seriousness. This ordinary person’s failure is worth our attention, and his repentance deserves our respect. Even in its first texts, then, the Christian revolution of values—its insistence that each person is of infinite worth because God has found him worth dying for—leads to a revolutionary expansion of the ways in which human life can be represented.

Perhaps the most distinctive genre of the early Church was the martyr-story, which played a paradoxical role in expanding ancient representation. The martyrs, too, were often ordinary people by the standards of Classical antiquity. Some were bishops, but plenty were deacons, widows, laypeople. What’s more, unlike conventional stories of heroism, the martyr-story does not celebrate its protagonist’s virtues. St. Stephen is not exalted for his own qualities; he is neither the bravest, nor the wisest, nor the most skilled preacher among the church in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, God gives him the grace to imitate Christ in loving unto death. The paradox of the martyr-story in Classical literature is that, by attempting to write about what God has done, the Church became able to write more richly of human beings as well. We can see this paradox in The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, a short autobiographical account by a Christian mother in her early twenties, written in prison while she awaited her execution for the faith. The text explodes ancient expectations about who should write (Perpetua is a woman) and what they should write about (she tells her own story, not an account of gods or heroes)—not to assert herself, but to relate the great things that God has done.

The fullest example of this paradox—that a Christian writer discovers the human self by writing of God’s glory—is St. Augustine, whose Confessions invents the genre of autobiography. Augustine begins his book by asking, how can I, a creature, praise my God? He narrates his life to solve this problem: only by showing how far he had fallen from God can he give full praise to the love that brought him back. Like so much ancient Catholic writing, Augustine’s work is a literary case of the Christian paradox that it is only in losing our life for God’s sake that we find it.

As late antiquity became what we call the Middle Ages, the Church gave rise to popular forms of art infused with a Christian spirit. Catholic art until Augustine had been oppositional—it had been the art of a self-conscious minority that pushed back against mainstream culture. The Catholic art of the Middle Ages was an expression of the whole people, even if artists were often intensely aware of their own and their society’s failure to embody the spirit of the Gospel. One of the delights of medieval art is how thoroughly and naturally the Faith infuses the whole range of artistic production, from painting and sculpture to writing, music, tapestries, household goods and architecture.

Two interestingly opposite tendencies develop in medieval art. First, there is the rise of art that emphasizes its role as a window onto divine reality. Medieval iconography is perhaps the most dramatic example of this development: where ancient sculpture celebrates idealized, muscular human forms, iconography sought to lift our minds in prayer by opening a window onto higher realities. Icons are full of symbols; for example, when a figure’s hand joins two fingers together and leaves three upright, it indicates the three persons of the Trinity and the dual nature of Christ. This is not to say that such art is unrealistic—as you can see in the 12th-century Sicilian mosaic of Christ Pantocrator that appears at the head of this article, icons often show extraordinary detail and ability to observe the human form—especially the human face. But their primary purpose is to point us toward spiritual meanings rather than to depict realistic scenes on earth.

In its focus on symbolic meaning over concrete specificity, iconography resembles the great allegorical poetry and chivalric romances of the Middle Ages, most famously the stories of King Arthur’s court. Usually, these stories are internal, mythical, and representative; they are concerned with knights seeking to be virtuous and succeeding or failing. The stories might show great psychological insight about virtue and temptation, but the characters are usually types, not individuals. Thus, the wonderful late-medieval alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows Sir Gawain as a young, ambitious knight who goes on an adventure that tests his virtues. The poem does not try to render Gawain as a specific individual, as a novel might do; it lets us see him as the representative of a psychological type. Similarly, such writing usually depicts the material world for its allegorical meaning, not for its own sake. Allegorists will depict a forest when they want to represent the hero’s confusion, but not when they want to show you what the leaves look like in the shadows.

A second medieval tradition, which is more interested in material reality, finds its roots in the growing devotion to the suffering body of Christ. During the Middle Ages, devotions such as the Five Holy Wounds became widespread in the Christian west and Church art began to emphasize greater realism in the depiction of Christ’s passion. You can see this change in two crucifixes. The twelfth-century San Damiano Crucifix, famous because St. Francis received his vocation while praying before it, is painted in an iconographic style. The cross is full of figures—the witnesses to the Crucifixion, angels and saints, the hand of God the Father, and an image of Christ rising from the tomb. The image emphasizes Christ’s Glory through the numerous figures redeemed by His passion. By contrast, the 14th-century Czech Premyslid Crucifix, which appears on the facing page, depicts the physical reality of Christ’s suffering. The accompanying figures are gone; Christ’s limbs are stretched, thin and wasted. His ribcage is bare, and his feet twisted in pain. This crucifix places us at the foot of the Cross as Mary and St. John must have seen it, unwilling to look past Friday in the hope of seeing Sunday.

The contrast between these crucifixes, and these styles, introduces a recurring problem for Catholic art: how can we represent both specific earthly reality and that reality’s allegorical and mystagogical significance? The first crucifix speaks of the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice, but gives less attention to its bodily reality. The second shows our Lord broken and bleeding on the cross but does not show the souls that his suffering won. Increasingly, the challenge for Catholic art became how to do both.

As Auerbach has shown, Dante Alighieri went further than any other medieval artist—possibly further than any artist—to combine these strands of Catholic art. The Divine Comedy is a richly imagined allegory, full of the theological significance of the greatest medieval romances. But it is made up of characters rendered with the rich individuality of a modern novelist—whose individuality nevertheless signifies a deeper spiritual reality. To give just one example: when Dante enters a circle of materialist heretics who deny the existence of the soul, he finds them in stone tombs, each lit with a fire inside. We can read this image allegorically: when we live as though this life is all that matters, we imprison ourselves in a kind of living tomb. Further, Dante observes that “The lids have all been lifted;/no guardian is watching over” the tombs (Inferno X ll. 8-9, trans. Mandelbaum). The materialists could leave their tombs at any moment between now and the final judgment; it is only their own twisted wills that keeps them trapped.

The characters whom Dante meets in this circle express its allegorical significance while also demonstrating distinct, unique individuality. When the Florentine politician Cavalcante de Cavalcanti speaks to Dante from one of the tombs, he assumes that Dante’s “high intellect” enables him to travel through hell (in fact, as Dante repeatedly emphasizes, it is God’s grace, not Dante’s intellectual or artistic gifts, that granted him his vision). Cavalcanti asks, “why is my son not with you?” Certain that the greatest poets travel through the afterlife, Cavalcanti is offended that his son Guido is not included. Then he sees Dante’s shocked face, intuits that Guido has died, and sinks, back into the tomb—without asking Dante, who has traveled through the afterlife, where his son might have ended up, and without asking Dante to pass on his fatherly love if he meets his son. Cavalcanti’s despair at his son’s death is not a father’s genuine heartbreak; he despairs because his hope for glory through his son’s poetic gifts has come to naught. Cavalcanti’s hopes for his son are selfish, and they become a symbol of the prisons that we build for ourselves out of earthly ambition. At the same time, they remain utterly his, personal to this individual—and throughout the poem we meet dozens of such people, each a fully rendered individual who manages to serve as a symbol of sin, virtue, or grace.

The individuality of Dante’s characters helped launch the Italian Renaissance, which began a process of increasing interiority, personality, and interest in everyday life. As painters developed techniques of perspective, they rendered the subjects of religious art with greater realism. Thus, Raphael’s Madonna del Prato depicts Mary as a mother-in-action, keeping an eye on a young John the Baptist as he (perhaps over-eagerly) shows a long cross to a toddling Christ. The painting’s traditional symbolism—the cross on the pole, the triangular structure of the three figures which recalls the Blessed Trinity, the deep red of Mary’s tunic that foreshadows her son’s blood—hints at the scene’s spiritual meaning while its domestic naturalness keeps us rooted in the historical reality of Christ’s life. Likewise, the psychological realism of Shakespeare and English metaphysical poetry combines a deep attention to individual psychology with attention to the spiritual meaning of the action.

As Western art and literature developed from the 18th through the 20th centuries, however, its attention to interiority, psychological individuality, and the material world came unmoored from moral and metaphysical significance. Many artists became concerned only with this world. The novel became steadily more internal, aiming to depict the inner world of its protagonists and increasingly severing them from the world outside themselves. In this context, Catholic art became oppositional. Catholic artists participated in the new interest in unique human individuality, but they insisted that human actions matter because they take place in a world beyond us. Our actions become meaningful, Catholic art insists, when they participate in the symbolic language through which God speaks His love to the world. Another way to put this is that Catholic artists aimed to depict unique individual lives while showing that those lives mean something more than themselves.

Willa Cather exemplifies this Catholic fusion between a protagonist’s individuality and God’s work. Cather was not a Catholic; she was a well-informed, fellow-traveling Anglican like C.S. Lewis. However, she wrote about Catholics with such knowledge and sympathy that she was often mistaken for one of us. In Shadows on the Rock (1931), Cather addresses the intersection of human particularity and divine meaning through the life of Cécile Auclair, a twelve-year-old French girl living in 17th-century Quebec. The novel is deeply rooted in Cécile’s consciousness; it tracks her thoughts and feelings over the course of a year living in this small French colony. Like many modernist novels, it downplays dramatic plot developments in favor of small moments of everyday beauty and meaning. The Church’s liturgical year makes up the larger pattern within which Cécile lives her life, and the novel shows the Church’s great feasts through their meaning for this girl.

Unlike many modernist novels, however, Cather fuses Cécile’s individual consciousness with a larger theological meaning. During the year, Cécile befriends Jacques, a poor, seven-year-old boy with no father and a neglectful mother, whom Cécile often finds out in the piercing Canadian winter. She arranges to have shoes made for him, invites him into the Auclair home, and generally watches over him. Near the end of the novel, Cécile’s father tells her that they will return to France, which her father still considers home but which Cécile left as a small child. Cécile asks her father what will become of Jacques and he replies that, in France, she will meet her younger cousins and soon forget about him. Her father thinks that Cécile simply wants someone to care for someone. But Cécile, for the first time, stands up to her father. This boy depends on her, and she could never replace him with another. Cécile’s father, though he is usually kind and understanding, in this moment expresses a distinctively modern self-centeredness: what matters is what a person means to Cécile, not what he means in himself. Cécile speaks from a richly realized Catholic tradition in which her own interiority is interwoven with her duties to other people, so that her loyalty to Jacques becomes a symbol of God’s loyalty to us. In this, the promise of Catholic art is to show us how God’s love does not cancel our individuality; it makes possible an individuality that lasts.

TITLE IMAGE: Icon of Christ Pantocrator from the 12th century Palatine Chapel in Sicily.