On Baptising the Visual Arts: A Friar's Meditation on Art

Abstract

I owe my sub-title to Winefride Wilson, one of the last members of that remarkable English Catholic experiment in the uniting of art, worship and life, the Ditchling Community, That was how she rendered the German name of an important manifesto for the revival of Christian art Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensgiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), ‘Heartfelt Outpourings of an Art-loving Cloister-brother’. Wackenroder’s impassioned appeal for a renaissance of Christian art, so moribund in his period as in our own, has lost nothing of its relevance today. In this article, I propose to indicate, first of all, the significance of this subject; secondly, to place this discussion in its contemporary secular context; and thirdly, to make some proposals for retrieving, and enhancing, the lost riches of the Church’s iconography.The Second Vatican Council instructs all Catholics that ‘those decrees of earlier times [the reference is to the Second Council of Nicaea, 787, and the Council of Trent, 1545-1564] regarding the veneration of images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the saints be religiously observed’. And this bare statement of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, is filled out in its sister text on the Holy Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. In the latter, we find a distinction (to which I shall return) between ‘religious art’, ars religiosa, and ‘sacred art’, ars sacra, seen as the high-point of religious art at large.