Allow me to put before you today some very brief and very simple reflections. You will, no doubt, consider them too simple, but still I hope that they are inspired by good sense.
What I should like to examine with you very rapidly is the present state of relations between Catholic artists and the Catholic public. We must observe right off that in general they are not very satisfied with one another. And as in family quarrels, we must no doubt say here too that there are "faults on both sides," and that each side has some good reasons for complaining.
Just about everything has been said about what is called the art of Saint-Sulpice -- an ill-chosen phrase, it must be said, and one that is very insulting to an estimable Parisian parish, the more so because the scourge in question is world-wide in scope; about the diabolical ugliness, offensive to God and much more harmful than is generally believed to the spread of religion, of the majority of the objects turned out by modern manufacture for the decoration of churches; about the kind of bitter contempt that still reigns in some "respectable" circles with regard to artists and poets; lastly about the absence of taste and artistic formation that makes so greatly to be desired the establishment in seminaries of courses in aesthetics or the history of art such as Pius XI, before his elevation to the Pontificate, organized at Milan.
Yes, indeed; but on the other hand there are a great many parish priests who ardently desire to fulfill the wish of Pius X, "to have their people pray before beauty," and who are trying to rid their churches of the products belched forth from the cellars of religious mercantilism. Yet many of these, we must candidly confess, are not satisfied with what is proposed to them in the name of modern Art. I am clearly not referring to a few superior works, but to the average run of works produced these last few years. Our affection for our friends must not prevent us -- rather the contrary -- from stating what may still be lacking in an effort that in other respects commands our heartiest admiration. And I say that often these parish priests are right, for their office, let's make no mistake about it, is not to encourage the fine arts, but to give the faithful that which answers their spiritual needs, that which can truly serve the religious life of a Christian community. One sometimes sees them driven to fall back in despair upon the art of Saint-Sulpice. Why? Because these products of commercial manufacture, when they are not too disgusting, have at least the advantage of being perfectly indeterminate, so neutral, so empty that we can look at them without seeing them, and thus project onto them our own sentiments; whereas certain modern works, and the most agitated and impassioned among them, seek to impose on us by violence the individual emotions, exactly as they are -- in the brute state, and with all that they have of the most subjective -- of the artist himself. And in praying, instead of finding oneself before a representation of Our Lord or some Saint it is an unbearable torture to receive full in the chest, like a blow of the fist, the religious sensibility of Mr. So-and-So.
The present difficulties, to tell the truth, stem from deep-seated causes, and in the end from the crisis of our whole civilization. Religious art is not a thing that can be isolated from art itself, from the general movement of the art of an age: isolate it, and it grows corrupt, becomes dead letter. But on the other hand the art of a period carries with it all the intellectual and spiritual stuff that constitutes the life of this period; and notwithstanding all the rare and superior qualities contemporary art may possess in the order of sensibility, quality and invention, the spirituality it conveys is often quite mediocre and sometimes quite corrupt.
This is why Christian artists find themselves faced with very grave difficulties. On the one hand, they have to reaccustom to beauty the faithful, whose taste has been spoiled for more than a century past -- and we must not forget that, given the purpose for which it is intended, religious art, as prescribed by Urban VIII on March 15, 1642, and by the Council of Trent, must not have an "unfamiliar" character -- and so it is a question of destroying bad aesthetic habits while restoring a good one: no easy task. On the other hand, in order to recover a truly living religious art, they must lift up, spiritualize, and bring to the feet of God all of modern art: no easy task either. It is true that by this very fact the Christian artist, if he has the genius, is in a privileged position to profit from the whole modern effort.
What follows from all of this? It is only too evident that the Catholic public would fail in an essential and particularly urgent duty if it failed to understand the capital importance of the task undertaken with admirable generosity by so many artists who are working to reintroduce sensible beauty into the house of God, if it did not effectively support them, and if, even when it does not approve of this or that work in particular, it did not surround them with a fraternal sympathy. But it is also clear that Catholic artists for their part must make every effort to understand the legitimate needs of the faithful, for whose common good they are working, and to ascertain, courageously, the proper conditions and exigencies of the task to which they are devoting themselves.
But, it may be asked, cannot certain of these conditions be stated? I think, in any case, that a few elementary truths which force themselves upon us concerning religious art can be disengaged, which, if they were universally recognized, would doubtless facilitate concord between the public and artists. Allow me to attempt to formulate some of them, ones on which, I believe, all of us here are agreed, and which correspond to the common sentiment of all our friends.
First Observation. There is no style reserved to religious art, there is no religious technique. Anyone who believes in the existence of a religious technique is on the high road to Benton. If it is true that not every style is equally suited to sacred art, it is still more true that sacred art, as I said a moment ago, cannot be isolated, that it must, in each period, following the example of God Himself who speaks the language of men, assume, while superelevating them from within, all the means and all the technical vitality, so to speak, that the contemporary generation puts at its disposal. (From this point of view, let us observe parenthetically, it does not seem at all necessary that Christian artists, particularly those who have not come into full possession of their craft, should work exclusively in sacred art. Let them begin with still-lifes, let them accustom themselves to discovering a religious sense in the inevitable apples, fruit-dish, pipe and guitar.)
There are, however, it seems to me, in the technical order, two requisite conditions for religious art as such, granted its special object and the purpose for which it is intended.
1. It must be legible. For it is there above all for the instruction of the people, it is a theology in figures. An illegible, obscure and Mallarméan religious art is as absurd as a house without a staircase or a cathedral without a portal.
2. The work must be finished. I do not mean finished in the academic sense, but in the most material and humble meaning of this word. It is supremely fitting that nothing enter the house of God but work that is well made, complete, proper, durable, honest. This must clearly be understood according to the mode peculiar to the style and the means adopted, but the facility with which in our day one is satisfied with oneself makes it necessary to insist on this point.
Second Observation. Sacred art is in absolute dependence upon theological wisdom. In the signs it presents to our eyes something infinitely superior to all our human art is manifested, divine Truth itself, the treasure of light that was purchased for us by the blood of Christ. It is above all for this reason, because the sovereign interests of the Faith are at stake in the matter, that the Church exercises her authority and magisterium over sacred art. I recalled a moment ago the decree of Urban VIII of March 15, 1642, and the prescript of the 25th session of the Council of Trent. There are other instances. On June 11, 1623, the Congregation of Rites proscribed crucifixes representing Christ with arms updrawn. On September 11, 1670, a decree of the Holy Office forbade the making of crucifixes "in a form so coarse and artless, in an attitude so indecent, with features so distorted by grief that they provoke disgust rather than pious attention." And you know that in March, 1921, the Holy Office forbade the exhibition in churches of certain works of the Flemish painter Servaes.
Here is a point that merits all our attention. Servaes is a painter of great talent, a Christian full of faith, and one can only speak of his person with respect and affection; I am happy to bear testimony to him here. The Stations of the Cross which raised such violent commotion in Belgium gave birth to deep religious emotions in certain souls, nay more, brought about conversions. Nevertheless the Church condemned it, and it is never difficult, even when the appearances and the human procedures disconcert us, to understand the wisdom and justice of the Church's decisions. In spite of himself, assuredly, and not in his soul but in his work, the painter, fascinated by the Ego sum vermis et non homo of Isaias and conceiving his Stations as a pure vertigo of grief, happened to be false to certain theological truths of capital importance -- above all the truth that the sufferings as well as the death of Our Lord were essentially voluntary, and that it was a divine Person who suffered the most appalling human suffering: the pain and agony of His Humanity were handled by the Word as the tool with which He performed His great work. At the same time, for those who cannot harmonize the poor figurations that art places before their eyes and the pure image living in our hearts of the most beautiful of the children of men (in Him, as in His Mother, as Cajetan reminds us in his treatise De Spasmo beatae Virginis, the supreme torments of Calvary, though piercing the mind still more cruelly than the body, left reason intact under the Cross, in full exercise of its dominion over the sensitive part) -- for these, I say, certain plastic deformations, a certain degenerate aspect of the contour, take on the value of an offense against the Humanity of the Savior, and, as it were, of a doctrinal misapprehension of the sovereign dignity of His soul and body.
At a time when the truth of the Faith is threatened on all sides, why be surprised that the Church is more concerned than ever about the doctrinal distortions that can be implied in certain works of art intended for the faithful, whatever may be in other respects their aesthetic value and the salutary emotions they may here or there excite, and whatever may be the piety, faith, depth of spiritual life, and uprightness of intention of the artist who produced them?
May I be permitted however to add that from this same point of view of dogma the base sentimentality of so many commercial products must equally vex sound theology, and is doubtless tolerated only as one of those abuses to which we resign ourselves for a time, considering human weakness and what may be called, adapting a phrase of Holy Writ, "the infinite number of Christians with bad taste."
This ultimate control by theology that I just mentioned, and which presupposes in the artist a true theological culture, clearly does not impose on sacred art any aesthetic genre, any style, any particular technique. We must, however, realize that it communicates to it, as it were spontaneously, certain general directions. Thus the intrinsic characteristics of the object represented have assuredly for sacred art a very special importance: not, certainly, from the point of view of the naturalist imitation of material detail and picturesque appearance, which is more out of place and execrable here than elsewhere, but from the point of view of the laws of intellectual signification. If one reflects on the essential deficiency of the means of expression of human art in relation to the divine mysteries to which these means are applied, on the terrible difficulty of expressing in a sensible matter truths that bridge heaven and earth and unite the most opposite realities, one is even led to think that sacred art, however rich it ought to be in sensibility and humanity, in order to attain to a certain spiritual fullness will doubtless always have to retain something of the hieratic and, so to speak, ideographic symbolism, and, in any event, of the sturdy intellectuality of its primitive traditions.
Third Observation. A last point -- a very simple one -- is that a work of religious art must be religious. Otherwise it is not beautiful, since beauty presupposes essentially the entirety of all the requisite conditions. As Paul Cazin remarked, tell an artist dealing with a religious subject "that he has produced a masterpiece, but that his masterpiece is not religious, and you will pain him greatly. . . ." And Cazin continues: "God alone can touch men's hearts with a feeling of piety before the most miserable chromolithograph or the most distressing daub, as well as before the most sublime masterpiece." That is true, but it does not prevent the fact that normally certain works have of themselves a value, a radiance of religious emotion, of interior illumination, and, properly speaking, of sanctification. Nevertheless, repeating once more what Maurice Denis has said, this does not depend on the subject itself. Nor does it depend, I am convinced, on the recipe of a school and a particular technique. It would be a great delusion to think that clumsy angles and a humble subject matter are the necessary means of expression of a Franciscan emotion, or that a geometric stiffness and dull, austere tones are required in order to give to a work the seal of Benedictine dignity.
There are no rules for giving an art object a value of religious emotion. This depends, on the contrary, on a certain interior freedom with regard to rules. One achieves it only by not seeking it directly, and only by participating, in one manner or another, in the spiritual life of the Saints: something which the common Christian atmosphere of an era of faith made easy for artists, even when, from many points of view, they remained far from the examples of the Saints, but which, of itself and in the absence of exterior aids, requires in the soul the habitual radiance of the theological virtues and supernatural wisdom. And it is necessary, besides, that the virtue of art not remain separate, isolated from this wisdom, because of an insufficient mastery or of false academic principles, but that between the two contact be made, and that this wisdom freely use the virtue of art as a supple and infallible instrument.
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Source: Shawn Tribe, "Jacques Maritan on Sacred Art," Liturgical Arts Journal, September 27, 2019, https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2019/09/jacques-maritain-on-sacred-art.html.
Friday, September 27, 2019
Saturday, July 6, 2019
John Henry Newman on the Appreciation of Classics with Age
[78] 4. Let us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical common-places, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing versification, at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is the reason of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half [79] lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time.
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Source: John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903), 78–79.
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter4-2.html
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Source: John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903), 78–79.
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter4-2.html
John Ruskin's Criticism of Modern Ephemerality
I was doing my usual bit of reading in Mr. Ruskin's works and came across this passage (below) in his (mostly forgotten), The Political Economy of Art (1857). It is about one of the ubiquities of our modern lives, television, or perhaps now, streaming video. In either respect, it is remarkable for its prescience. But, then, such presciences is what makes Ruskin Ruskin.
One note as you start to read. The passage appears to be, for the most part, about woodcuts. But that is an illusion for, as we've learned as these posts have gone on their not always merry way, Ruskin, like other great artists, often worked in allegory, letting his readers have the pleasure of going to that deeper level where not only the more profound meaning lives, but where the greater fun is.
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Source: James L. Spates, "Will It Last? Ruskin's Criticism of Modern Ephemerality," http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/spates4.html.
One note as you start to read. The passage appears to be, for the most part, about woodcuts. But that is an illusion for, as we've learned as these posts have gone on their not always merry way, Ruskin, like other great artists, often worked in allegory, letting his readers have the pleasure of going to that deeper level where not only the more profound meaning lives, but where the greater fun is.
[As we consider the kind of world in which we would like to live and work, it should be noted that, when it comes to the creation of art,] the first great secret is to produce work that will last. Now, the conditions of work lasting are twofold. It must not only be in materials that will last but it must be itself of a quality that will last. It must be good enough to bear the test of time. If it is not good, we shall tire of it quickly and throw it aside; we shall have no pleasure in the accumulation of it.
So that the first question [to ask of someone concerned about] any work is: “Will it lose its flavor by keeping? It may be very amusing now and look much like a work of genius, but what will be its value a hundred years hence?” You cannot always ascertain this…[but] of one thing you may be sure: that art which is produced hastily will also perish hastily; and that what is cheapest to you now is likely to be dearest in the end.
I am sorry to say the great tendency of this age is to expend its genius in perishable art of this kind, as if it were a triumph to burn its thoughts away in bonfires. There is a vast quantity of intellect and of labor consumed annually in our cheap illustrated publications. You triumph in them, and…think it so grand a thing to get so many woodcuts for a penny. Why woodcuts, penny and all, are as much lost to you as if you had invested your money in gossamer. More lost, for the gossamer could tickle your face and glitter in your eyes; it could not catch your feet and trip you up. But bad art can--and does: for you can’t like good woodcuts as long as you look at the bad ones!
If we were, at this moment, to come across a Titian woodcut, or a Dürer woodcut, we should not like it, those of us at least who are accustomed to the cheap work of the present day. We don’t like, and can’t like, that for long! But when we are tired of one bad cheap thing, we throw it aside and buy another bad cheap thing, and so keep looking at bad things all our lives!
Now, the very men who do all that quick, bad work for us are capable of doing perfect work. Only: perfect work can’t be hurried, and therefore it can’t be cheap beyond a certain point. But suppose you pay twelve times as much as you do now, and you have one woodcut for a shilling instead of twelve pence—and the one woodcut for a shilling is as good as art can be, so that you will never tire of looking at it. And is struck on good paper with good ink, so that you will never wear it out by handling it, while you are sick of your penny papers by the end of the week, and have torn them mostly in half too. Isn’t your shilling’s worth the best bargain?Not infrequently during the days when I taught regularly, I would ask my students to read this passage, and ask them after if they had seen that it was about television. Most would look back at me, perplexed. But a few would get it right away. These fews [sic], as you encounter them over the years, are the great joy of teaching. We'd then have a general discussion where we tried to determine the value of the video world in which they increasingly live. Before the class ended, I would ask them if they'd be willing to apply, the next time they were tempted to indulge, what I consider to be the great test of anything that's on television (or streaming!): to ask the question, after the indulgence, whether, as a result of that indulgence, they were better human beings because of the experience, where I defined better as smarter, kinder, warmer of heart, more appreciative of the world in which they live, or wiser. Most looked at me, perplexed. But not those few!
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Source: James L. Spates, "Will It Last? Ruskin's Criticism of Modern Ephemerality," http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/spates4.html.
John Ruskin on Taste and Morality
The following is a wonderful application of the Aristotelian-Thomistic notion of virtue to culture and taste: a truly virtuous man takes delight in doing the good. A sign of his lingering viciousness is if he still finds it distasteful to do the good. And St. Thomas further suggests that art disposes us either to good or evil by how it affects us.
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Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good architecture merely by asking people’s advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word ‘taste;’ for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. ‘No,’ say many of my antagonists, ‘taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no sermons to us.’
Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their ‘taste’ is, and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul. ‘You, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what do you like?’ ‘A pipe and a quartern of gin.’ I know you. ‘You, good woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?’ ‘A swept hearth and a clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, and a baby at my breast.’ Good, I know you also. ‘You, little girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?’ ‘My canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths.’ ‘You, little boy with the dirty hands and the low forehead, what do you like?’ ‘A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch-farthing.’ Good; we know them all now. What more need we ask?
‘Nay,’ perhaps you answer: ‘we need rather to ask what these people and children do, than what they like. If they do right, it is no matter that they like what is wrong; and if they do wrong, it is no matter that they like what is right. Doing is the great thing; and it does not matter that the man likes drinking, so that he does not drink; nor that the little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will not learn her lessons; nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at the sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday school.’ Indeed, for a short time, and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to like doing it. But they only are in a right moral state when they have come to like doing it; and as long as they don’t like it, they are still in a vicious state. The man is not in health of body who is always thirsting for the bottle in the cupboard, though he bravely bears his thirst; but the man who heartily enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each in its proper quantity and time. And the entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.
But you may answer or think, ‘Is the liking for outside ornaments, — for pictures, or statues, or furniture, or architecture, — a moral quality?’ Yes, most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for any pictures or statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here again we have to define the word ‘good.’ I don’t mean by ‘good,’ clever — or learned — or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice: it is an entirely clever picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an ‘unmannered,’ or ‘immoral’ quality. It is ‘bad taste’ in the profoundest sense — it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian’s, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality — it is the taste of the angels. And all delight in art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the quality which we call ‘loveliness’ — (we ought to have an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which deserve to be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being. What we like determines what we are, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller’s window. It was — ‘On the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.’ ‘Ah,’ I thought to myself, ‘my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and “Pop goes the Weasel” for music. You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:— he won’t like to go back to his costermongering.’
And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice, or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever, either in bad art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce.
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Source: John Ruskin, "Traffic," in The Crown of Wild Olive. Found at https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/ruskin/john/crown/lecture2.html
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James Spates's comment on the above passage when he was a professor:
On the not too distant past, I often read the Ruskin passage below to my students; after which, I passed out copies of it. I told them they could easily test out what he had in mind. They could go back to their dorm rooms and take a careful look at the posters, art, or pictures they had put on their walls and make a list of them. That done, they could make a second list: Of the music--titles of albums, songs, names of artists--they listened to regularly. Then they could make a third list: Of all the things they had posted on Facebook and Twitter during the past week. After that--always trying to get them to do a little sociology!--I suggested they might go and do the same sort of gazing at their friends' dorm room walls, asking those familiars to create similar lists of their own music favorites and social media "interactions," an request which, surely, these friends, being such, would be more than happy to oblige. (As it turned out, some of these folks weren't so eager to be friendly regarding such requests.) The last step was obvious: After thinking carefully about what was on their own walls and in their lists and comparing these with whatever friends' versions they had collected, they'd have a fairly accurate sense of what their, and these others', tastes were. I can honestly say that not a few of my young reporters reported being fairly appalled at what their taste appeared to be, appalled by what they found, or did not find, on the lists! (It might be useful to generate such lists ourselves.)
Source: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/spates5.html
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Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good architecture merely by asking people’s advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word ‘taste;’ for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. ‘No,’ say many of my antagonists, ‘taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no sermons to us.’
Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their ‘taste’ is, and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul. ‘You, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what do you like?’ ‘A pipe and a quartern of gin.’ I know you. ‘You, good woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?’ ‘A swept hearth and a clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, and a baby at my breast.’ Good, I know you also. ‘You, little girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?’ ‘My canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths.’ ‘You, little boy with the dirty hands and the low forehead, what do you like?’ ‘A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch-farthing.’ Good; we know them all now. What more need we ask?
‘Nay,’ perhaps you answer: ‘we need rather to ask what these people and children do, than what they like. If they do right, it is no matter that they like what is wrong; and if they do wrong, it is no matter that they like what is right. Doing is the great thing; and it does not matter that the man likes drinking, so that he does not drink; nor that the little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will not learn her lessons; nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at the sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday school.’ Indeed, for a short time, and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to like doing it. But they only are in a right moral state when they have come to like doing it; and as long as they don’t like it, they are still in a vicious state. The man is not in health of body who is always thirsting for the bottle in the cupboard, though he bravely bears his thirst; but the man who heartily enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each in its proper quantity and time. And the entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.
But you may answer or think, ‘Is the liking for outside ornaments, — for pictures, or statues, or furniture, or architecture, — a moral quality?’ Yes, most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for any pictures or statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here again we have to define the word ‘good.’ I don’t mean by ‘good,’ clever — or learned — or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice: it is an entirely clever picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an ‘unmannered,’ or ‘immoral’ quality. It is ‘bad taste’ in the profoundest sense — it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian’s, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality — it is the taste of the angels. And all delight in art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the quality which we call ‘loveliness’ — (we ought to have an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which deserve to be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being. What we like determines what we are, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller’s window. It was — ‘On the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.’ ‘Ah,’ I thought to myself, ‘my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and “Pop goes the Weasel” for music. You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:— he won’t like to go back to his costermongering.’
And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice, or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever, either in bad art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce.
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Source: John Ruskin, "Traffic," in The Crown of Wild Olive. Found at https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/ruskin/john/crown/lecture2.html
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James Spates's comment on the above passage when he was a professor:
On the not too distant past, I often read the Ruskin passage below to my students; after which, I passed out copies of it. I told them they could easily test out what he had in mind. They could go back to their dorm rooms and take a careful look at the posters, art, or pictures they had put on their walls and make a list of them. That done, they could make a second list: Of the music--titles of albums, songs, names of artists--they listened to regularly. Then they could make a third list: Of all the things they had posted on Facebook and Twitter during the past week. After that--always trying to get them to do a little sociology!--I suggested they might go and do the same sort of gazing at their friends' dorm room walls, asking those familiars to create similar lists of their own music favorites and social media "interactions," an request which, surely, these friends, being such, would be more than happy to oblige. (As it turned out, some of these folks weren't so eager to be friendly regarding such requests.) The last step was obvious: After thinking carefully about what was on their own walls and in their lists and comparing these with whatever friends' versions they had collected, they'd have a fairly accurate sense of what their, and these others', tastes were. I can honestly say that not a few of my young reporters reported being fairly appalled at what their taste appeared to be, appalled by what they found, or did not find, on the lists! (It might be useful to generate such lists ourselves.)
Source: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/spates5.html
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Accepting the Pre-1955 Holy Week Requires Accepting the Novus Ordo
[Emphases mine.]
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Source: Arturo Vasquez, "Notes on Liturgical Maximalism," Reditus blog, April 30, 2019, https://arturovasquez.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/notes-on-liturgical-maximalism/.
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Warning of Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) at Notre Dame de Paris (1937)
Be vigilant! Yes, there are many who, like the apostles in Gethsemane the moment their Master was about to be arrested, seem to fall asleep in their blind unconsciousness, convinced that the threat hanging upon the world does not affect them, that they bear no responsibility and run no risk in the crisis in which the universe struggles in anguish. … How many remain deaf and inert to Christ’s warning to his own Apostles: Vigilate et orate ut non intretis in tentationem! … Be vigilant!
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Source: Luiz Sérgio Solimeo, "ISIS and a Jesuit Priest Rejoice as Notre Dame Burns," The American TFP, April 23, 2019, https://www.tfp.org/isis-and-a-jesuit-priest-rejoice-as-notre-dame-burns/.
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Source: Luiz Sérgio Solimeo, "ISIS and a Jesuit Priest Rejoice as Notre Dame Burns," The American TFP, April 23, 2019, https://www.tfp.org/isis-and-a-jesuit-priest-rejoice-as-notre-dame-burns/.
Leo XIII on When Christendom Existed
There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies.
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Source: Leo XII, Encyclical Immortale Dei, Nov. 1, 1885, no. 21, http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_01111885_immortale-dei.html.
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